New Delhi: The fight over the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls widened on Tuesday, with the Congress stepping up its demand for chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar's resignation, the CPI(M) taking out a night march in Kerala, and the BJP's Arunachal Pradesh unit backing the exercise.
In Mumbai, Congress workers protested near Kurla East station against what they called irregularities in the SIR and demanded Kumar's resignation. The demonstration was held on the directions of MP and Mumbai Congress president Varsha Gaikwad and under the guidance of North-Central Mumbai district Congress president Arshad Azmi. Among those present were Dalpatram Borana, Yateen Salvi, Ramesh Doifode, Prakash Shelke, Pradeep Ingale, Jafar Lohar, Sunil Yadav, Ravindra Kurdia, Reshma Sheikh and Ambika Yadav. They raised slogans like 'vote chor, gaddi chhod' and 'Gyanesh Kumar istifa do'.
In Kerala, thousands joined a night march organised by the CPI(M) Malappuram district committee on Monday, demanding Kumar's resignation over the alleged denial of voting rights to crores of citizens. The marchers carried torches, placards, banners and party flags, and raised slogans against Kumar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The march also expressed solidarity with the protests at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.
A fresh audit has flagged how centralised the Election Commission's digital platform, ECINet, has become. The review, by the civic tech initiative 'Charchagram', says enumeration form details are shown state by state, and access for State Nodal Officers can be switched off at will. The report is authored by Saurav Rajput, a data scientist. Election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi have raised objections to the centralisation of ECINet and the electoral roll database.
The audit says the platform can bar electoral registration officers and assistant EROs only in West Bengal from reviewing voters' enumeration forms. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said the law gives EROs statutory authority over the electoral roll, but 'the ECINet system and the Election Commission's IT division have overruled and violated these safeguards'.
From the other side, the BJP's Arunachal Pradesh unit backed the SIR. At a party meeting in East Kameng district on Monday, state general secretary Tadar Niglar said electoral roll revision 'should not be misrepresented as an arbitrary exercise'. He criticised the protests by CJP and the Congress-led INDIA bloc as politically motivated.