NEW DELHI: Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal, accompanied by Delhi chief minister Atishi, met the chief election commissioner on Wednesday to raise concerns over alleged mass deletion of voters’ names ahead of the Delhi assembly elections scheduled for early 2025.
Kejriwal also wrote a letter to the chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar, demanding that no further voter deletions be carried out in any assembly constituency to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process amidst recent row of vote deletions.
Speaking to the media after the meeting, Kejriwal alleged that the BJP was conspiring to undermine the democratic process by targeting specific voter groups.
“Today, we submitted a 3,000-page dossier to the Election Commission detailing how BJP is orchestrating the deletion of voters’ names, especially targeting the poor, Scheduled Castes, and Dalits. In Shahdara, for instance, a BJP worker submitted a list of 11,000 voters to have their names removed,” he said.
He added, “A vote is the cornerstone of a citizen’s rights in a democracy. Deleting voters’ names amounts to stripping them of their citizenship rights. We have urged the Election Commission to halt this mass deletion process and to file FIRs against those responsible.”
He also claimed that the Election Commission assured AAP that no mass deletions would occur before the elections.
Senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia earlier accused the BJP of resorting to voter suppression tactics to counter AAP’s stronghold in Delhi. “When it has become impossible for the BJP to defeat AAP in Delhi through fair means, they are now attempting to manipulate the electoral rolls. Applications have been submitted to delete the names of voters who have lived in the same area for years,” Sisodia said during a joint press conference with AAP MP Raghav Chadha.
Chadha raised questions about the transparency of the voter deletion process. “How can the BJP-led central government delete voters’ names without informing political parties? It defies protocol for hundreds of voter deletion applications to originate from a single individual in one day. Proper house-to-house verification by booth-level officers is mandatory, and representatives of all political parties must be involved to ensure transparency,” he said.
The allegations come as AAP prepares to defend its dominant position in the Delhi assembly, having secured 62 of the 70 seats in the 2020 elections. The BJP, which won only eight seats in the last elections, has been accused of trying to erode AAP’s voter base through these alleged tactics.