AAP flags irregularities in Delhi SIR process
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday alleged large-scale irregularities in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in the national capital, claiming
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday alleged large-scale irregularities in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in the national capital, claiming that nearly 50 per cent of residents in Delhi's villages and unauthorised colonies have not received enumeration forms, despite the Election Commission's claim that more than 99% have been distributed.Noting the large-scale irregularities in the process, AAP Delhi President Saurabh Bharadwaj said that if people do not even receive the enumeration forms, they cannot be expected to fill and return them, making their SIR verification impossible.Addressing a press conference at the AAP headquarters on Monday, Bharadwaj said, "The Election Commission claims that more than 99% of enumeration forms have been distributed in Delhi, but reports from the ground show that this is completely false. I appeal to the media to visit any village or unauthorised colony and ask residents whether they have actually received the enumeration forms."Nearly 50% of them, Saurabh Bharadwaj said, would state that the forms had never reached them.He stated, "BLOs are sitting on large numbers of enumeration forms instead of distributing them. While forms have been delivered door-to-door in affluent neighbourhoods and DDA flats, they have not been distributed in villages and unauthorised colonies, which together account for nearly 70% of Delhi's population."Meanwhile, Burari MLA Sanjeev Jha said, "Votes are being deleted on such a massive scale in the name of the SIR exercise that its magnitude is difficult to imagine. The BLOs entrusted with this responsibility are simply not reaching the people.
In my Burari constituency, Polling Booth No. 64 has 1,670 registered voters, but only 510 forms have been submitted. At Booth No. 158, only 427 forms have been submitted out of 1,460 voters, while at Booth No. 160, only 280 forms have been submitted out of 1,041 registered voters."He further said, "Only about 30-35% of forms have been submitted at each polling booth. When BLOs are asked about the next step, they say they have been instructed by higher authorities to mark everyone else as 'shifted,' which effectively means their names will be deleted from the electoral rolls."Giving an example, Sanjeev Jha said that one individual tracked down a BLO, only to be told that his SIR verification had already been completed in Uttarakhand, even though he had been living in Delhi for the past 30 to 40 years. When the matter was verified, it was found that no SIR verification had taken place anywhere. "BLOs are merely completing formalities and deleting votes by matching similar names in the system without carrying out proper verification," he said.The AAP MLA said that many residents of unauthorised colonies were not highly educated, and this was being exploited to carelessly delete their votes. During the pre-SIR exercise conducted over the summer vacation in June, around 1.3 to 1.4 million votes had already been deleted. "Now, even people who had voted in the previous election were complaining that their names no longer appeared on the electoral rolls," he stated.On behalf of the AAP, Sanjeev Jha appealed to the Election Commission to either extend the timeline for the SIR process or provide a solution regarding the votes deleted during the pre-SIR exercise.
The BriefWire