India’s Congress party has demanded the immediate resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over what it calls vote theft. At a meeting of the Congress Working Committee on Tuesday, party president Mallikarjun Kharge made the demand and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should also resign, accepting moral responsibility for putting pressure on the commission.
After the meeting, working committee member KC Venugopal told the media the prime minister should have intervened to stop what was being done in the name of the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls. “It was his moral duty, but he did not fulfil it. So he should resign too,” he said.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was the first to speak out about “vote rigging” by the Election Commission, having earlier set out how voters’ names were being removed and how the chief election commissioner was helping the ruling BJP. Members at the meeting said the English-language national daily The Indian Express had borne out those allegations, making clear that for 10 months one person had effectively taken all decisions at the commission.
Kharge told the meeting that Gyanesh Kumar had effectively become a puppet of the ruling party, that Indian democracy was in danger under this electoral system, and that Congress was determined to rescue the country from this situation.
After a long discussion, the working committee adopted a resolution saying Gyanesh Kumar must resign immediately without wasting time, and that the ongoing SIR must be scrapped at once. Beyond scrapping the SIR, the resolution said, the 133 million voters whose names have been removed from the rolls must be restored now.
The resolution said Gyanesh Kumar had organised this “shameless vote theft” on behalf of the prime minister and the home minister, and that the constitution and hard-won democracy could not be saved unless they resigned. Regaining the right to vote is no less than the freedom struggle, it said. Congress will fight to protect this right on the streets, in the courts and in parliament, and the fight will not stop until those responsible are punished.
The opposition INDIA bloc meets on Wednesday, a day after the working committee meeting. But the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Tamil Nadu’s DMK will not attend. AAP governs Punjab, which votes next year, with Congress as its rival. MK Stalin is angry that Congress dropped the DMK and backed TVK to form the government in Tamil Nadu, and he has not yet decided whether the DMK will stay in the alliance.
Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav will also miss Wednesday’s meeting, saying he must be with party leaders that day as nominations are filed for the Rajya Sabha election, though another party leader will attend. It remains to be seen whether INDIA bloc partners agree with the Congress working committee’s resolution.
Two other developments on Tuesday added to the pressure and embarrassment for the BJP and the Election Commission. A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant agreed to hear quickly a case raising serious questions about the commission’s work and Gyanesh Kumar’s role, and said the hearing would take place next week.
The petition says all the commission’s decisions should ideally be unanimous, or otherwise taken by majority. But the commission’s own statement shows that for 10 months many decisions were not taken by majority, raising serious questions about how it works.
The second source of pressure came from S Chockalingam, chief electoral officer of BJP-ruled Maharashtra. It emerged on Tuesday that on September 24 he wrote to the Election Commission asking for greater powers for electoral registration officers (EROs) in adding names to voter rolls. The Indian Express reported that he proposed four changes to the ECINET software to expand EROs’ powers, and wrote about it to IT director general Seema Khanna, among other officials. Serious allegations have been made against Khanna of concentrating power through ECINET.
The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has already called a nationwide movement from Gandhi Jayanti. The INDIA bloc is also expected to choose that day to launch its campaign against the commission.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report