By Ayushi Kar & Vishnu Narayan
Dhaka, East Champaran District, Bihar: Repeated attempts have been made to purge nearly 80,000 Muslim voters from Bihar’s Dhaka constituency electoral roll by wrongfully claiming that all of them are not Indian citizens, an investigation by The Reporters’ Collective has found.
To get these Muslim voters deleted, formal written submissions were made to the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) district officer (Electoral Registration Officer or ERO) and to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Bihar.
One submission was made in the name of the personal assistant of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s MLA from Dhaka, Pawan Kumar Jaiswal. The other was made on the letterhead of the BJP’s state headquarters in Patna, documents reviewed by us reveal.
It was a systematic and targeted attempt to single out and delete Muslim voters en masse in the Dhaka constituency, we have been able to establish. Such attempts to tamper with and manipulate voter lists by providing false information are a crime. But the ECI officials did not take any action against people attempting the large-scale disenfranchisement of citizens in Dhaka.
How the ECI will decide the fate of these voters will become clear only when the finalised list of voters in Dhaka is released on October 1. We found, during our reportage, that some Muslim citizens who had heard that the BJP had given their names for deletion were living in anxiety. Many, we found, were not aware of the attempt to get them declared as alien citizens.
The sitting BJP MLA, did not respond to these revelations. But, he has turned around to accuse the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of seeking deletion of 40,000 Hindu voters. He, however, declined to speak or share the proof with us to back his claim despite repeated requests.
Dhaka is a border constituency in East Champaran district of Bihar, where the BJP wrested the assembly elections in 2020 from RJD by a margin of 10,114 votes against the total polled 2.08 lakh votes.
Even a few thousand wrongful deletions in the constituency could have a significant impact on the elections. The attempts were made to purge 40% of the eligible voters from the final voter list.
This is how this voter list fraud has been attempted in Dhaka constituency.
This story was originally published in reporters-collective.in. Read the full story here.