“I will visit the collector’s office and will kill myself there,” Kirti Kumar can be heard shouting over a phone call in a video circulating on social media.
Kumar, a booth level officer in Jaipur’s Hawa Mahal assembly constituency, says he is being threatened and pushed beyond capacity to look into BJP’s objections seeking the deletion of 470 voters – nearly 40 percent of his booth – from the draft electoral rolls published after the Special Intensive Revision. He alleged these requests target Muslim voters and that he had already verified all these voters.
Notably, Hawa Mahal is a Muslim-majority constituency that BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya – locally referred to as “Maharaj” – won in the 2023 assembly elections by a margin of just 974 votes. Acharya, the chief priest of Jaipur’s Dakshinmukhiji Balaji Temple, has since drawn repeated controversy over actions and remarks ostensibly targeting Muslims.
At least three BLOs have died in Rajasthan amid allegations about work pressure and the way the SIR was conducted, from app glitches to inadequate training.
‘Maybe I should remove voters from entire basti’
In the clip on social media, Kumar can be heard telling BJP councillor Suresh Saini over the phone: “Maybe I should remove voters from the entire basti, that can help you as well as Maharaj win the election comfortably.”
Kumar, who teaches English at a government school, said SIR workload had already left his students affected. And now he has been told by “senior election officials” to process these 470 forms “within two days” – work which he describes will take at least 78 hours since it takes 10 minutes to digitise each form. This is “like repeating the entire exercise again,” he said.
“And then I have to hit the ground again to verify these voters. This is like repeating the entire exercise again. I cannot do this. Humara pehle hi khoon jal gaya SIR mai…BJP politicians are threatening us that they will get us suspended. I know their politics very well. I have informed my seniors that I cannot do this.”
BLOs from at least five neighbouring booths, where the majority of voters are Hindus, said they received no objections. Saraswati Meena, BLO of another booth in the area, claimed she received objections against 158 voters. “All of them are against Muslim voters filed by the BJP agents. All of them voters live there. We have done their verification in the SIR. This is wrong. We cannot be pressured this way.”
Hawa Mahal has 264 booths.
This story was originally published in newslaundry.com. Read the full story here.
