India opposition condemns election chief after newspaper investigation

NEW DELHI: India's political opposition demanded the removal of the top election official on Wednesday (Sep 23) after a newspaper investigation alleged that decisions behind a contentious voter-roll revision may have been taken illegally.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has been under scrutiny in recent months over the nationwide revision that has struck millions of names from voter lists since last year.

The ruling party says the revision aims to strike off fraudulently registered voters, but the opposition argues it is politically motivated and also targeting legitimate ones.

The report by the Indian Express focused on internal divisions within the three-member ECI.

It said the body's chief, Gyanesh Kumar, overruled objections from the other two members at least 14 times during the past 10 months, leading to the removals of some 130 million voters.

Such overrulings may be unlawful because the commission is supposed to work based on the consensus of at least two members, according to the report.

The main opposition Congress party accused Kumar of acting unilaterally at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"It was already known that things were not exactly well within the ECI," Congress party spokesman Pawan Khera said in a social media post.

"But just how messy, dysfunctional and, frankly, disturbing things had become is (now) laid bare."

KC Venugopal, another senior Congress party leader, demanded Kumar's "immediate removal" and a Supreme Court-monitored investigation.

Arvind Kejriwal of the opposition Aam Aadmi Party accused Kumar of "vote-rigging" and said any order without consensus should be considered "illegal".

Kumar has not commented on the report, which the ECI said gave "only one part of the picture".

"All these decisions are an outcome of the unanimous decisions of the full Commission in the past one year",it said in a statement on Wednesday.

The ECI maintains that the revision was intended to remove duplicate entries and prevent "foreign illegal immigrants" from appearing on voter rolls.

The BJP, a Hindu-nationalist party, has long alleged that undocumented migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh have fraudulently registered as voters. Many such migrants are Muslims.

Rights groups and opposition parties say legitimate voters are being struck off to benefit the BJP.