Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has drawn sharp criticism from the Election Commission over allegations of irregularities in India’s electoral rolls.
The Congress leader, speaking at a recent press conference on Thursday, alleged that multiple entries and duplications in the voter list compromise the integrity of the electoral process.
The Election Commission of India has rejected Gandhi’s claims and disregarded established legal procedures. On Friday, the Election Commission cited “The Kamal Nath judgement” that, it said, gives a settled position to the machine-readable document. The poll panel stated that repeatedly raising the same issues shows that Rahul Gandhi has no respect for the Supreme Court of India’s decisions.
“Law provides a specific procedure for both making objections to the roll and for appealing. Instead of availing the legal processes, he tried to sensationalise the issue by making baseless claims in the media,” the poll panel sources said.
What is the Kamal Nath Judgement?
The ECI is referring to allegations made in 2018 by then Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) president Kamal Nath that were rejected by the Supreme Court reliability of ECI’s voter databases.
In 2018, Kamal Nath had approached the Supreme Court claiming that the electoral rolls in Madhya Pradesh showed multiple entries of the same faces, up to 36 times, based on data sourced from a private website.
The court, however, found no merit in the claim, particularly after the Election Commission of India (ECI) demonstrated that the supposed discrepancies had already been rectified months prior to the petition. The court refused to grant the relief sought, including the demand for searchable PDF formats of electoral rolls.
Rahul Gandhi alleged that similar discrepancies still exist, including multiple entries of the same name across different states. One example he cited was a voter named Aditya Srivastava, allegedly listed in three different State rolls. However, ECI sources assertively said that this error had been corrected months ago, and the updated rolls had been duly published.
The poll panel said it is a settled proposition that if law requires a certain thing to happen in a certain manner, then it should be done in that manner only and not in any other manner.
“Therefore, if Rahul Gandhi believes in his analysis and believes that his allegations against ECI are true, he should have respect for law and sign the Declaration or Apologise to the Nation for raising absurd allegations against ECI,” it said.
What had Kamal Nath sought?
Kamal Nath had sought directions from the Supreme Court for the Election Commission to conduct VVPAT verification in at least 10 per cent randomly selected polling stations and to publish the draft voter list in “text format” ahead of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections in November 2018. In his petition, Kamal Nath said his party identified 60 lakh duplicate voters in the electoral rolls in Madhya Pradesh.
Kamal Nath had demanded that draft electoral rolls be published in word format in place of the current practice of having them on the website of the Chief Electoral Officers to help weed out the fake names.
What did the Supreme Court say?
The SC bench of Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan found force in the Election Commission’s argument that the Election Manual provides for publishing the draft electoral roll in “text mode”. Kamal Nath cannot claim as a right that the draft electoral roll should be placed on the website in a “searchable mode,” the court said.
“It is for the ECI to decide the format in which the draft electoral roll is to be published,” Justice Sikri, who wrote the judgment, said.
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