BHOPAL: More than 20 months after the Congress suffered one of its worst poll defeats against the ruling BJP in Madhya Pradesh, the main opposition party alleged on Tuesday “vote theft” in at least 27 seats during the 2023 assembly elections in the central Indian state.
Leader of opposition Umang Singhar, while sharing data-based graphics of the 2023 assembly polls with journalists, said the Congress lost to the BJP by very narrow margins in at least 27 constituencies.
“The narrow winning margins on these seats were less than the number of voters added on each of those seats in two months preceding the elections, which suggests that the BJP may have been given an unethical advantage on these seats,” Singhar alleged.
While the victory margin of BJP candidates on the 27 seats ranged between 28 votes and 15,671 votes, the number of voters added in the voter list on those seats in two months before the polls spanned between 3308 and 23,519 votes.
The 27 seats, included Surkhi in Sagar district where Jyotiraditya Scindia-loyalist minister Govind Singh Rajput won by 2178 votes. As many as 8994 voters were added to the voter list in the same seat in two months before the elections.
The Alirajpur-ST seat of western MP, which was wrested by BJP’s Nagarsingh Chouhan (another minister in the present Dr Mohan Yadav government) saw Chouhan winning by a margin of 3723 votes on the seat, where 3975 voters were added in two months ahead of elections.
Further, another minister of the current state government, Nirmala Bhuria, wrested the Petlawad-ST seat of western MP’s Jhabua district by 5647 votes. As many as 7041 voters were added to the voter list of the same constituency within two months before the polls.
In the Shajapur seat of western MP, the BJP candidate Arun Bhimawad won by a slender margin of 28 votes from the seat where 6134 voters were added within two months ahead of polls.
Importantly, 18 of the same 27 seats were won by the Congress in the 2018 elections.
The current LoP, Singhar, who was the forest minister in the 15-month-long Kamal Nath government, claimed that in seven months between January 5 and August 2, 2023, the total number of voters in Madhya Pradesh increased by about 4.64 lakh, while in just two months between August 2 and October 4, there was an unexpected rise of 16.05 lakh electors.
“Taking these figures into account means that 26,000 voters were added daily between August 2 and October 4, 2023 in the state,” Singhar claimed.
While alleging large-scale irregularities in the voter list, including abnormal increase in the number of voters, and duplicate entries, Singhar said the Madhya Pradesh State Election Commission had issued an order on December 2, 2022, directing the removal of 8,51,564 fake/duplicate entries in the voter list but no district officer made the deletion report public. He claimed the relevant data was not made available even through the Right to Information route.
The Congress MLA demanded that the Election Commission freeze the final voter list, get signatures of all political parties on the published roll and avoid any changes till the completion of elections.
Singhar asked the EC to release complete data on voters in 'machine-readable format' and provide CVS (file format) instead of PDF images so that independent scrutiny of the list can be done.
Responding to the LoP’s ‘vote theft’ allegations on 27 seats in the 2023 elections, MP minister Vishwas Sarang, questioned why did the Congress take 20 long months to wake from the slumber on the issue.
“According to the law, the poll results can be challenged/complaint made within 45 days of the declaration of the election results and even after the declaration of the election, up to 10 days before the last date of nomination, then where was Congress? Objection to the election can be made only through an election petition, not by holding a press conference. Congress, which falsely invokes the Constitution, neither follows constitutional arrangements nor respects constitutional institutions.”
“There is a clear legal provision for every objection or correction related to the voter list. Under the Representation of People Act 1951, every citizen and political party can lodge an objection if they see any discrepancy in the list. The Election Commission revises the voter list every year. The Congress and its leaders who are making false allegations now, should tell the people of Madhya Pradesh about when they complain about discrepancies in the voter list,” Sarang questioned.
The assembly polls were held in a single phase in MP on November 17, 2023. The BJP scored a massive 163-66 seats, upsetting the calculations of most poll pundits.