Telangana elections: With 70 lakh discrepancies in voter’s list, will the poll be fair?

Hyderabad, Sep 17: The Telangana assembly elections are round the corner and from initial assessments it appears as though K Chandrashekar Rao and his TRS could sail through easily.

Amidst the election heat, the Congress has now alleged that there are 70 lakh discrepancies in the voters' list and the urgent dissolution of the assembly was done only to manipulate the election process.

The Congress feels that the problem in the voters' list is far more acute than one could have imagined. Congress spokesperson, Abhishek Manu Singhvi pointed out that close to 70 lakh voters were found to be falling under the categories of duplicates, deleted and disqualified.

He asked if the decision to dissolve the assembly was to swing the elections in the favour of the TRS by manipulating 70 lakh voters through contamination of the voters' list. There are 30 lakh duplicate voters on the rolls published by the Election Commission on September 10. Besides close to 20 lakh voters whose names were deleted from the rolls between 2014 and 2018 are also present on the list. Singhvi said that what was even more ironic was the fact that there were 18 lakh voters whose names are found both on the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana voter rolls.

The Congress claimed that the TRS government has deliberately chosen to ignore the "numerous discrepancies" in the voters' list.

The Congress alleged that the KCR government had in 2015 ordered the Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana to delete 15 lakh names from the voters' list for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Elections.

"Was the purpose behind such a deletion was to disenfranchise those individuals who did not vote for TRS? The exercise was stopped by the Election Commission, after an investigation, upon a complaint by the Congress party exposing the illegality of these efforts which also resulted in the transfer of the municipal commissioner," Singhvi also said.