Hyderabad Muslim voters say BJP BLA sought their deletion despite knowing them since childhood

“We’ve known Balu since our childhood. We grew up together,” 30-year-old Mohammed Shareef said. He was referring to SV Balachander, the booth level agent (BLA) for polling station 210 under Hyderabad’s Musheerabad Assembly constituency.

Balachander, also a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been accused of submitting around thirty Form 7 applications to the polling station’s booth level officer (BLO).

A BLA is appointed by a recognised political party to assist voters while a BLO is an official government appointee of the Election Commission of India (ECI). Form 7 is used to seek the deletion of a person’s name from the electoral rolls if they are deceased, have shifted elsewhere or have two voter IDs.

The forms submitted by Balachander contain the names of Muslim residents from the same slum in Chikkadapally. They’re all his neighbours. None of the 30 names Balachander has submitted meet the criteria for deletion.

Congress BLA and the party’s Bhaglingampally division vice president Mohammad Baba Sharfuddin is also among the 30 names Balachander submitted for deletion. He lives a mere 150 metres away from Balachander’s residence and has known the BJP BLA for over two decades.

“I have been a BLA in this area for nearly 20 years. I got a call from the BLO a week ago saying that form 7 was submitted seeking my deletion. I was baffled,” Sharfuddin told TNM.

“I then learnt that it wasn’t just my name but also my wife’s, my four siblings and their wives and some of their children. A total of twenty names from my family alone were submitted for deletion,” he added.

After learning this, Sharfuddin confronted Balachander.

“I asked him how he could do this. But he just told me that they had given him the forms in the BJP office and asked him to submit them. He said, ‘Anna (elder brother), I don’t know what Form 7 is used for,’” Sharfuddin said.

TNM made multiple phone calls to Balachander and even visited his house, but he remained unreachable.

The allegations aren’t limited to Sharfuddin and his family. A stone’s throw away from Balachander’s home lives Shareef. Ten of his family members are also among the names Balachander submitted.

“I only learnt of the issue when officials came for an enquiry,” Shareef’s brother Nawaz told TNM.

Sharfuddin informed election officials, including the constituency’s Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) Praveen Reddy. A first enquiry was conducted by the BLO and lower officials, while a second was carried out by the ERO and senior electoral officials.

“The deputy commissioner visited us on September 30 and informed us that there was a Form 7 objection against us. We didn’t even know what the issue was, nor did we know what form 7 was about until then,” Nawaz added.

While the votes of all thirty residents are safe, there has been no action taken against Balachander.

“I understand that he has been scapegoated, and I believe that he didn’t understand the gravity of it. But there has to be some accountability,” Sharfuddin added.

Sharfuddin added that questions remain regarding why the objections were filed in the first place. When he flagged it to his superiors in the party, the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) submitted a complaint to the Telangana Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Sudarshan Reddy to look into the matter.

“We are open to an inquiry. It is important that action is taken against those who file objections of this nature,” Sharfuddin also said.

On October 1, Telangana CEO Sudarshan Reddy said that multiple Form 7 applications would not automatically result in the deletion of voters. “Every bulk request is subjected to scrutiny and verification before any change is made to the electoral roll,” he said.

There was, however, no mention of any punitive action against those who filed bulk Form 7 requests despite similar allegations in Karnataka. At the time, the Karnataka CEO had asked EROs to take legal action against anyone filing Form 7 in bulk based on fake claims.