At Altinho protest, seeks Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s arrest
Panaji: The Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) on Friday held a protest outside the office of the Chief Electoral Officer at Altinho, Panaji, demanding the resignation and arrest of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the alleged Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise ‘nexus’, wherein lakhs of voters’ names have been deleted.
During the protest, an effigy of Kumar was burnt. Regarding the issue of 97 voters whose names could not be restored before the publication of Goa’s final electoral roll, Congress has given a 15-day ultimatum to restore the names, failing which it will once again hold a protest along with those voters whose names were not restored.
AICC Goa in-charge Manikrao Thakare, GPCC president Girish Chodankar, working president and Aldona MLA Carlos Ferreira, and spokespersons Amit Palekar and Savio Coutinho demanded Kumar’s resignation during a press briefing.
Describing the SIR process as a script from Hitler’s Nazi regime, Ferreira alleged that this was a new script from Hitler’s pages, “rewritten as ‘Vote Chori through SIR’. The BJP is grabbing power through the manipulated SIR”.
Congress said that a national media exposé on Goa voters shows how the system is operated to favour the BJP. Ferreira demanded that genuine eligible voters be brought back on the rolls before the ensuing elections and that no eligible voter should be deprived of their voting rights.
Chodankar said that the party was contemplating taking all possible legal remedies to counter this “vote chori”.
Giving details of the SIR process in Goa, Coutinho said that Congress national leader and LoP in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had been exposing the fraud in SIR in several states and felt that Goa could not be any different, and hence started monitoring the SIR from day one.
“The SIR in Goa was hijacked by the BJP and a former top BJP leader from Tamil Nadu was given the task to oversee the SIR in Goa, who in turn gave constituency-wise targets for deletion of non-BJP voters, and more particularly minority community voters,” Coutinho alleged.
Palekar alleged that in constituencies like St Cruz, nearly 18 per cent of votes were deleted, mostly those of minorities, which “has been done systematically”.
According to the Congress, with the various methods adopted for deletion, Goa saw 1.39 lakh voters deleted during the Goa SIR.
“Even if one considers 50% as genuine deletions, the remaining 50% works out to 1,750 voters deleted per constituency; which is a serious concern as we have seen several constituencies where the winning margins were below 1,500 votes,” Congress said in a press statement.
