A day after the discovery of nearly 10,000 voter ID cards in a Bengaluru apartment, which triggered rigging allegations ahead of the Karnataka election on Saturday, sources in the Election Commission have said that the BJP’s demand for cancelling voting at a constituency is far-fetched and not possible.
Voters can vote even without voter IDs by showing other proof.So just because of 9,000 cards were found in that flat doesn’t warrant countermanding of polls in Rajarajeshwari Nagar says election offcials.
The Election Commission has directed the police and Karnataka’s top election officer to investigate the apartment located in Rajarajeshwari Nagar, one of the 223 constituencies where voting will be held on the weekend.
In a press conferences and tweets that went on past midnight, the BJP alleged that the apartment was linked to a lawmaker of the state’s ruling Congress. The Congress in turn accused the BJP of enacting a “drama” of raiding an apartment owned by a local BJP leader and planting “fake evidence”.
Karnataka’s Chief Electoral Officer Sanjiv Kumar along with Bengaluru city police commissioner, T Suneel Kumar, said two trunk-loads of counterfoil strips, which appeared to be acknowledgement slips from the form used to add names of voters, were also found. But the forms were not the same colour as those used by the Election Commission.After a surprise visit was paid to a flat in Jalahalli locality, nearly 9,746 voter ID cards were found. Five laptops and one printer was also found in the flat,” said Mr Kumar.
In a tweet, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar accused the Congress of engineering the “conspiracy to rig election in face of their imminent defeat”.
Strongly rebutting the charges, the Congress, in a series of tweets, accused the BJP of an elaborate plan to discredit the ruling party.
BJP enacted this drama in an apartment belonging to their own leader, Manjula Nanjamari. She has rented the apartment to her son Mr Rakesh who contested the 2015 BBMP (local) elections on a BJP ticket. Apartment was not raided by police or EC but by BJP workers,” said Congress’s Randeep Singh Surjewala.
Dismissing the Congress’s allegations, Union minister Sadananda Gowda tweeted an Election Commission document, which said Mr Rakesh is not Ms Nanjamari’s son.
However, Sridhar Nanjamari speaking to reporters I rebuffed such allegations and told he was the only son of Manjula Nanjamuri.”I am the only son of Manjula Nanjamari. Rakesh is my mother’s nephew’s son and he has got no connections with the flat in Park View apartment, as is what claimed in media,” Sridhar said, and added that the flat has been rented to Rangaraju who pays rent for it every month he added .
Raja Rajeshwari Nagar is one of the larger constituencies in Bengaluru and has about 4.71 lakh voters. In 2013, the seat had gone to the Congress’s Munirathna, who bagged a 37 per cent vote share. Munirathna, seeking re-election, is pitted against the BJP’s Muniraju Gowda PM who put out a video of his search on Facebook.
Sanjiv kumar CEO,hold a press conference on Wednesday and said,It is a very serious issue that the ECI is looking into.It has sent deputy election commissioner Chandra Bhushan Kumar.The ECI will quickly take a final call on the election based on his report.On whether he had recommended countermanding of the poll, he just said he’d sent a comprehensive report to the ECI.He said the flying squad had seized 9,896 EPICs (Electoral Photo ID Cards) which were all genuine.Also, 6,342 voter application acknowledgement receipts with BBMP seals, 20,700 acknowledgement receipts without BBMP seals, five laptops, three malfunctioning copiers, nine mobiles, PAN cards and driving licences were among other things seized.These voter cards were systematically collected one by one for some purpose.At the outset, it looks like an effort to influence vulnerable voters.He said election officials have also seized documents suggesting that the perpetrators had conducted a thorough household survey before collecting the EPICs.The survey included collation of details like the person’s name, age, gender, caste, mobile number and account number of old-age pension, if any.The survey reports also included photographs of houses surveyed.EPICs were carefully bundled and the packets bore the the names of slums from where the cards had been collected. The modus operandi suggests a wellplanned operation.Initially it was projected that the cards found were bogus and we were concerned about the possibility of the perpetrators breaching into our IT systems to create fake IDs.That said, it’s a very serious issue, especially considering the huge number of the cards seized. Answering a query, he said a few activists of BJP and JD(S) were already on the spot before the flying squad reached there.He brushed aside a question on whether sitting MLA and Congress candidate N Munirathna was a suspect.Let us not jump to conclusions just because a few bills bearing the picture of an MLA were found. It’s a serious matter that is under probe.Jalahalli police, meanwhile,arrested Congress corporator G K Venkatesh and Raghu for assaulting rival party workers who barged into the flat on Tuesdaymorning. Police have registered an FIR for criminal conspiracy against 10 people, including five women,in connection with the voter ID cards seized he added .
