It also called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation. The Congress Working Committee (CWC) demanded restoration of 130 million deleted voters in the electoral rolls and a halt to the special intensive revision (SIR).
After a CWC meeting on Tuesday, general secretary KC Venugopal announced a massive agitation at state, district and booth levels, in coordination with INDIA-bloc allies, and said the party would reach out to all voters who have had their names struck off the list. The Congress has consistently opposed SIR and sought to present it as a way to fix the mandate; on Tuesday, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi sought to compare the party’s fight against the exercise to the freedom movement. 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. 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. He also reminded the CWC that the party’s strategy is to both oppose and resist.
He referred to the Congress session in Lahore in 1929 when the party adopted the goals of Purna Swaraj or complete independence.
Also Read I Amid SIR row, Yogi says Congress conspiring to weaken democracy for political gain “This is not the game of Gyanesh Kumar. PM should resign as it was his moral responsibility to stop this exercise,” Venugopal said.
Mallikarjun Kharge says ‘vote greatest weapon for poor’
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. “The poor bear the brunt of all his flawed policies… I know that the poor possess only one source of power: their vote.
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).
In his opening speech, Kharge launched a vitriolic attack against both Prime Minister Modi and CEC Kumar, calling him a “puppet” of the ruling dispensation. “History bears witness that ten years ago, this very Prime Minister devastated India’s economy with the decision of “demonetisation. And now, ten years later, he is destroying our robust democracy through a conspiracy of “vote-demonetisation” (disenfranchisement),” Kharge said. 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 and deprived.
