“We’ve known Balu since our childhood. We grew up together,” 30-year-old Mohammed Shareef said. He was referring to SV Balachander, the booth level agent (BLA) for polling station 210 under Hyderabad’s Musheerabad Assembly constituency.
Balachander, also a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been accused of submitting around thirty Form 7 applications to the polling station’s booth level officer (BLO).
A BLA is appointed by a recognised political party to assist voters while a BLO is an official government appointee of the Election Commission of India (ECI). Form 7 is used to seek the deletion of a person’s name from the electoral rolls if they are deceased, have shifted elsewhere or have two voter IDs.
The forms submitted by Balachander contain the names of Muslim residents from the same slum in Chikkadapally. They’re all his neighbours. None of the 30 names Balachander has submitted meet the criteria for deletion.
Congress BLA and the party’s Bhaglingampally division vice president Mohammad Baba Sharfuddin is also among the 30 names Balachander submitted for deletion. He lives a mere 150 metres away from Balachander’s residence and has known the BJP BLA for over two decades.
“I have been a BLA in this area for nearly 20 years. I got a call from the BLO a week ago saying that form 7 was submitted seeking my deletion. I was baffled,” Sharfuddin told TNM.
“I then learnt that it wasn’t just my name but also my wife’s, my four siblings and their wives and some of their children. A total of twenty names from my family alone were submitted for deletion,” he added.
After learning this, Sharfuddin confronted Balachander.
“I asked him how he could do this. But he just told me that they had given him the forms in the BJP office and asked him to submit them. He said, ‘Anna (elder brother), I don’t know what Form 7 is used for,’” Sharfuddin said.
TNM made multiple phone calls to Balachander and even visited his house, but he remained unreachable.
This story was originally published in newslaundry.com. Read the full story here.