PTI
Bengaluru
Founder of CJP Abhijeet Dipke, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee and actor-activist Prakash Raj on Thursday joined hands against the SIR and staged a protest here demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation and the scrapping of revision exercise of electoral rolls.
Dipke, addressing a protest christened ‘people’s tribunal,’ held by civil societies and the CJP alleged that deletions of names of voters under the SIR were aimed at disenfranchising those opposed to the BJP and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the EC of “undermining” democracy.
The protest was held at the Freedom Park here. Dipke claimed that people whose names had been deleted from the electoral rolls were present at the agitation to demonstrate that they were alive. “Narendra Modi became Prime Minister by deleting and stealing votes,” he alleged.
Dipke said, “People who were declared dead are standing here alive. So the death that has taken place is not the death of these people. It is the death of the democracy of this country.”
Dipke claimed that 13 crore votes had been deleted across India and around one crore in Karnataka, saying the figure represented 13 to 14 per cent of the registered vote share.
Such deletions had helped the BJP win states it could not have won even during the peak of the Modi wave. Dipke raised slogans targeting CEC Gyanesh Kumar, saying, “Now, Gyanu, your turn has come” to quit following Dharmendra Pradhan who stepped down as Union Minister.
The RSS ideology did not believe in an inclusive India or the philosophies of Dr B R Ambedkar and ‘Periyar’ EV Ramasamy, and instead it invoked Nathuram Godse, the CJP founder claimed.
“We have to fight against that ideology to save our democracy and to save our country,” Dipke said.
Describing Mahatma Gandhi as the soul of India, Ambedkar as its backbone and Jawaharlal Nehru as its mind, Dipke said the country’s foundation was laid by the three leaders. He said Modi could not compare himself with them and alleged that he wanted to remain in power longer than Nehru by deleting votes.
