It also called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation. The Congress Working Committee demanded restoration of 130 million deleted voters in the electoral rolls and a halt to the special intensive revision or SIR.
After a CWC meeting on Tuesday, general secretary KC Venugopal announced a massive agitation at the state and district levels, in coordination with INDIA-bloc allies, and said the party would reach out to all voters whose names have been struck off the list. Earlier reporting noted: Presiding over the Congress Working Committee meeting in the national Capital on Tuesday, Kharge also demanded that voters whose names have been removed must be fully informed and given an opportunity to appeal. The CWC meeting saw the Congress shift its strategy from attacking Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar alone to holding the Prime Minister responsible for the “fraud exercise to destroy democracy of the country. “This is not the game of Gyanesh Kumar. He is only a tool. Whenever dictators lose the confidence of common voters, they will try to find special ways to stay in power. This exercise (SIR) could not happen without the concurrence of Modi and Amit Shah. It was done under clear directions of Gyanesh Kumar’s masters. The PM should have intervened and stopped this. Chairing the meeting, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge demanded that complete data regarding every major change made to the electoral rolls must be made public and “independent and time-bound inquiries must be conducted wherever evidence of serious discrepancies emerges. Political parties, he added, must be provided with the electoral rolls and relevant data in a simple format in a timely manner.
His reference was to the 2016 decision by the Modi government to invalidate high-value currency notes in a bid to tackle unaccounted wealth (or black money).
PM should resign as it was his moral responsibility to stop this exercise,” Venugopal said. “History bears witness that ten years ago, this very Prime Minister devastated India’s economy with the decision of “demonetization. And now, ten years later, he is destroying our robust democracy through a conspiracy of “vote-demonetisation” (disenfranchisement),” Kharge said. Earlier reporting noted: Kharge scales up SIR offensive at CWC, attacks PM Modi over ‘vote-demonetisation’ Equating the deletion of names from electoral rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive to “vote-demonetisation,” Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday called for removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over irregularities and issued a five-point list of demands to ensure transparency in the election process. Earlier reporting noted: Kharge also demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi must resign on moral grounds for “pressuring” the CEC.
He indicated that the plan will be discussed at the INDIA bloc meeting on Wednesday that has been called. “The poor bear the brunt of all his flawed policies. During demonetization, the poor stood in queues; with this move to disenfranchise voters, the poor are being pushed out of the queue altogether. I know that the poor possess only one source of power: their vote. Congress wants massive agitation with the help of all political parties. This is entirely illegal. Since the form sought details , it is believed that it could cause some problems for first-time voters.
Comparing Modi with former PM Rajiv Gandhi, who lowered the voting age from 21 years to 18, Kharge said, “In contrast, we have Prime Minister Modi, who is so resentful of Gen Z that he has hatched a conspiracy to disenfranchise the youth. He quietly altered the rules regarding ‘Form 6’. His reference is to the SIR declaration that was added on to Form 6 asking applicants for enrolment whether their own name or the names of their parents and grandparents appeared in a previous roll.
We will not let that be snatched away under any circumstances,” the Congress president said, arguing that vote is the greatest weapon for the poor, Dalits, the deprived, and the exploited sections of society, “Modi ji wants to snatch away this right, but we will not allow it to happen. Addressing the media after the CWC meeting, Venugopal said “We are going to aggressively resist with peaceful demonstrations across the country.
