Mischievous: EC On Tejashwi Yadav's Claims of His Name Missing In Bihar Electoral Draft List

The Election Commission (EC) has responded to RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav's claims that his name is not in the electoral roll.

The EC has said that his claims are mischievous and factually incorrect. "It has come to our attention that Tejashwi Yadav has made a mischievous claim that his name does not appear in the draft electoral roll. His name is listed at Serial Number 416 in the Draft Electoral Roll. Therefore, any claim stating that his name is not included in the draft electoral roll is false and factually incorrect," the Election Commission stated.

Earlier, the RJD leader claimed that his EPIC number is not fetching his name. "My name is not there in the electoral roll. How will I contest the elections?" Yadab added.

He then accused that the names of 20-30 thousand people have been missing in each assembly constituency and 65 lakh voters have been deleted from the list.

"Almost 20 to 30 thousand names have been removed from every assembly constituency. A total of around 65 lakh, meaning about 8.5% of voters' names, have been removed from the list. Whenever the Election Commission issued an advertisement, it used to mention that so many people have shifted, so many people are deceased, and so many people had duplicate names," Tejashwi added.

"But in the list provided to us by the Election Commission, they have cleverly not given the address of any voter, no booth number, and no EPIC number, so that we cannot find out whose names have been removed from the voter list," he claimed.

The EC's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has become a flashpoint between the ruling BJP and the opposition parties which have alleged voter fraud. While the exercise was started with an objective of cleaning up the electoral roll, the RJD and Congress have alleged that the SIR was used to remove geunine voters from rolls.