Samajwadi Party to submit proof of deletion of voters' names to EC today

A Samajwadi Party (SP) delegation will visit the Election Commission on Thursday to submit a written reply to the notice issued on the allegations that names of the Yadav and Muslims voters were struck off in bulk from the electoral rolls ahead of the Assembly polls earlier this year at the instance of the BJP.

The delegation will carry specific instances of the missing names and also hand over the voters' lists of booths where the names were struck off at the last moment, said senior party leaders.

SP national spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said: "We will hand over the documents to the commission on Thursday that we have managed to gather in the time that we got, to support our claims."

Former Minister Ravidas Mehrotra said: "Actually, we had come across this anomaly during the elections and informed our national president about it. It was on the basis of the feedback from us candidates that he said what he said. We have now collected the voters' list and verified on ground the names that were struck off to the best of our abilities given the limited time that the party had to file the reply."

The SP leadership had sent out a circular to candidates who contested the assembly elections on the party ticket, asking them to submit documentary evidence in this regard.

"We have come across instances where names, in some instances in hundreds, were found to be struck off from the list of one booth at the last moment," said a senior leader monitoring the compilation process.

On October 27, the EC had served a notice to SP national president Akhilesh Yadav asking him to furnish evidence of the allegations that names of almost 20,000 Yadav and Muslim voters were deleted by the Commission at the behest of the BJP in every Assembly constituency ahead of thepolls.

The SP chief was asked to furnish documentary evidence to back his allegations by November 10.

Akhilesh had levelled the allegations while addressing delegates at the party's national convention held in Lucknow in September.

--IANS

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