Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sept 29: The Congress Working Committee on Tuesday demanded the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for rigging the elections and resignation of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “vote theft.”
In a resolution adopted at its meeting on Tuesday, the CWC also demanded immediate suspension of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and the restoration of voting rights to over 13 crore voters whose names have been deleted from the electoral rolls on flimsy grounds under the SIR.
Addressing the CWC meeting, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi claimed that only the Congress could defeat the BJP and it had been acknowledged even by the BJP leaders including Mr Modi who had told him in a close-door meeting “you will come when we go.”
“You may not believe me now, but this is what Mr Modi said when we along with the Union Home Minister Amit Shah, met closed door for a selection meeting,” Mr Gandhi said. He also focused on the principle of resistance within the party and asked his colleagues to have confidence in themselves.
Mr Gandhi also called for an overhaul of a system that “blames the victim and shields the criminal”, urging the youth to protest against women’s harassment and rape, as the government only responds under pressure. “Stop punishing women for the crimes committed against them. Across our country, women are afraid to walk the streets, afraid of being harassed, afraid of being raped. And the government’s answer: stay at home. This is patriarchy at work: a system that blames the victim and shields the criminal. It is time to smash it,” he said in a post on X.
The CWC meeting, chaired by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, was attended among others by former party chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, party general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Jairam Ramesh and K.C. Venugopal.
A day before the meeting, Kharge said the Election Commissioners have “exposed” the working within the poll body by raising concerns over Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and changes in Form 6 for enrolling new voters, besides additions and deletions from voter lists and centralised control over the electoral roll database.
The Trinamool Congress is also learnt to be contemplating to release the audio recordings of the party’s earlier meeting with the CEC Gyanesh Kumar amidst the row over SIR exercise in West Bengal to highlight the arrogant manner in which Mr Kumar interacted with political parties during meetings with the poll panel. The party sources said on Tuesday that the recordings were expected to be released next week.
The Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge called for the immediate removal of the CEC for alleged irregularities in the SIR and resignation of Mr Modi on moral grounds for “pressurising” the poll panel chief to commit the irregularities.
The BJP hit out at the Congress for targeting the CEC and accused the main Opposition party of attempting to undermine the country’s electoral system after failing to get the support of people within the current democratic framework. Hitting out at the Congress the BJP general secretary Smriti Irani on Tuesday alleged that the Congress party, which was established “to preserve the British Empire, was today attacking the Election Commission of India. There could be nothing more shameful than this,” she said.
Ms Irani questioned why the Congress leadership was insisting on retaining deceased individuals and duplicate names in the electoral rolls. Accusing the Opposition party of duplicity, Ms Irani asked if the Congress leadership was giving a clean chit to the EC in States such as Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Kerala and Karnataka, where the BJP was not in power.
Former Union Home Secretary RK Singh accused the CEC of violating the law of the land in conducting the SIR exercise. In an open letter, he also urged the opposition parties to boycott elections until the CEC and the Election Commissioners resign.
On releasing the audio recordings of the party’s meetings with Mr Gyanesh Kumar, the TMC sources said the party has recordings of three meetings and claimed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi spoke for only a small part of the proceedings. The recordings, they said, would also show the nature of questions asked by the TMC delegation and the responses from the poll panel.
The TMC has been accusing the Election Commission (EC) of adopting a partisan approach in its ongoing hearing into rival claims over the party’s organisational control, name and election symbol. The dispute came before the poll panel after a group led by Ritabrata Banerjee challenged the authority of the existing party organisation and claimed control over the TMC. The Mamata Banerjee-led side has rejected the claim. The sources said the party had considered releasing the recordings earlier but decided against doing so at the time.
Meanwhile, protest demonstrations demanding Mr Kumar’s resignation continued to be held across the country. The Himachal Pradesh Congress held a State-wide protest against the functioning of the Election Commission of India (ECI), demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and action against him over what the party alleged were arbitrary and undemocratic decisions concerning the electoral process.
The Congress district units staged demonstrations at all 12-district headquarters in Himachal Pradesh and submitted memoranda addressed to the President of India through the respective Deputy Commissioners. In Shimla, the rural and urban units of the District Congress Committee jointly submitted a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner, Shimla, raising concerns over the functioning of the Election Commission and demanding the removal and resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner.
Left party leaders also held a protest at the Election Commission headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday, demanding Mr Kumar’s resignation. The CPI(M) General Secretary M A Baby, Brinda Karat, CPI leader and NFIW president Nisha Sidhu, and CPI(ML) Liberation central committee members Sucheta De and Shweta Raj were among those who took part in the protest. As the protesters raised slogans demanding Kumar’s removal, police forcibly detained them. “Gyanesh Kumar should resign or be removed. We cannot allow him to continue,” Baby said.
The Maharashtra Congress on Tuesday demanded action against the CEC alleging that the statutory powers of electoral registration officers to decide voter eligibility were being diluted through the ECI-Net system. Reacting to media reports that Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer S Chockalingam had sought restoration of powers of the sub-divisional magistrates (SDMs), Congress spokesperson Atul Londhe claimed certain officials had misused the software to classify voters and engineer electoral roll anomalies. “If there are anomalies or discrepancies, the statutory authority to decide who is a voter and who is not rests with the ERO, that is, the SDM,” Mr Londhe said.