Madhavi Latha, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s candidate in Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency, criticised the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) over its decision to delete 5.5 lakh bogus votes. She said that the BJP will cross check to see if all bogus votes are removed. The GHMC acts as the Hyderabad district’s election authority.
GHMC informed that since January 2023, a total 5,41,259 names were removed from electoral rolls, of which 47,141 were deceased, 4,39,801 shifted homes, and 54,259 were duplicate voters.
“If it could have been removed so easily, why was it not done till now? We will see if they have really removed it. We have the information of every vote,” she said. Latha has remarked in several of her campaign speeches that the only reason incumbent Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi and his AIMIM have been continuously winning every general election was due to the presence of bogus votes.
Responding to her claims, Owaisi, who is also the chief of the All India Majlis e Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), had said that statements like these are an insult to the Election Commission of India. “Every year in January, names are included in the list. There is time given to file for objections and then the final voter list is scrutinised. I have no role in this. Such statements also insult the OBC, Dalit and Muslim voters who step out to cast their vote,” he said.
The GHMC informed that currently there are 45.7 lakh voters in all the 15 constituencies in Hyderabad city. The highest number of deletions were in Nampally Assembly constituency at 21,407, of which 15,963 were marked as shifted voters, 2,843 as dead and 2,601 as duplicate voters. This is way less than the actual number of voters in the ASD list, at a whopping 62,000, largely at the behest of the Congress contestant, Mohammed Feroz Khan.
In all other constituencies, the actual deletions were way higher than those mentioned in the ASD list. Jubilee Hills followed Nampally with 21,222 deletions, of which 16,658 were shifted voters, 3,754 duplicate voters and 810 were deceased voters. Karwan had 20,722 deleted voters, of whom 12,527 shifted homes, 4,827 were duplicate, and 3,368 were deceased.
It is worth noting that in the 2018 Telangana Assembly elections, over 22 lakh voter names were deleted from the electoral rolls without informing voters causing then Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Rajat Kumar to publicly apologise.