BENGALURU: The Congress is preparing to hold a massive public protest in Bengaluru on Friday over alleged electoral fraud in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The Grand Old Party has trained its guns on the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) linked to what it called large-scale voter deletions in Bihar and alleged irregularities in voter additions in Maharashtra.
Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, who is also Karnataka Congress chief, held a meeting with CM Siddaramaiah and and other senior leaders ahead of the protest in which senior party leaders, including LoP in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, will be present.
“Rahul Gandhi will arrive by 10:30 am for the protest in Freedom Park against vote theft on Friday. Our leaders will lay evidence of vote theft before the Election Commission of India. I will not discuss the details now. I would like at least 50 leaders from each constituency in the state to participate. This is to send a message to the nation. Remember INDIA bloc meeting was held here,” Shivakumar said.
Meanwhile, Congress Rajya Sabha MP Dr Syed Naseer Hussain accused the Centre of evading scrutiny on what he termed a grave assault on democracy. “We are raising the same questions that the Supreme Court has raised. In one state, they win elections by adding voters; in another, they win by deleting them. The government should not run away from discussing the SIR with lame excuses saying it is before the court. Surely nothing prevents us from discussing it,” he said.
Karnataka Forest Minister Eshwar Khandre charged that lakhs of voters were added within three months in Maharashtra, with disproportionately high additions in constituencies won by BJP. “In Bihar, SIR has reportedly been used to delete lakhs of voters under the guise of cleansing electoral rolls — a move which is a cover for political manipulation... in Bangalore Central constituency, too, there was manipulation,” he said.
AICC General Secretary KC Venugopal hit out at the BJP, saying, “The Centre is evading urgent scrutiny on their devious SIR agenda. It is mass-scale voter deletion. We demand that they justify why they are carrying out this exercise to cripple democracy. We demand discussion, not deletion.”
The BJP has claimed that the matter is sub judice and cannot be debated in Parliament. However, Congress has rebutted this, pointing to former Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar’s recent ruling allowing discussions on the matter, contrary to an earlier Lok Sabha ruling by Balram Jakhar which the BJP is citing.
AICC President Mallikarjun Kharge, who is also LoP in Rajya Sabha and Rahul have held strategic meetings with floor leaders of opposition parties. It has been agreed that the SIR issue will be taken up as a top priority in Parliament.