“I will visit the collector’s office and will kill myself there,” Kirti Kumar can be heard shouting over a phone call in a video circulating on social media.
Kumar, a booth level officer in Jaipur’s Hawa Mahal assembly constituency, says he is being threatened and pushed beyond capacity to look into BJP’s objections seeking the deletion of 470 voters – nearly 40 percent of his booth – from the draft electoral rolls published after the Special Intensive Revision. He alleged these requests target Muslim voters and that he had already verified all these voters.
Notably, Hawa Mahal is a Muslim-majority constituency that BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya – locally referred to as “Maharaj” – won in the 2023 assembly elections by a margin of just 974 votes. Acharya, the chief priest of Jaipur’s Dakshinmukhiji Balaji Temple, has since drawn repeated controversy over actions and remarks ostensibly targeting Muslims.
At least three BLOs have died in Rajasthan amid allegations about work pressure and the way the SIR was conducted, from app glitches to inadequate training.
‘Maybe I should remove voters from entire basti’
In the clip on social media, Kumar can be heard telling BJP councillor Suresh Saini over the phone: “Maybe I should remove voters from the entire basti, that can help you as well as Maharaj win the election comfortably.”
Kumar, who teaches English at a government school, said SIR workload had already left his students affected. And now he has been told by “senior election officials” to process these 470 forms “within two days” – work which he describes will take at least 78 hours since it takes 10 minutes to digitise each form. This is “like repeating the entire exercise again,” he said.
“And then I have to hit the ground again to verify these voters. This is like repeating the entire exercise again. I cannot do this. Humara pehle hi khoon jal gaya SIR mai…BJP politicians are threatening us that they will get us suspended. I know their politics very well. I have informed my seniors that I cannot do this.”
BLOs from at least five neighbouring booths, where the majority of voters are Hindus, said they received no objections. Saraswati Meena, BLO of another booth in the area, claimed she received objections against 158 voters. “All of them are against Muslim voters filed by the BJP agents. All of them voters live there. We have done their verification in the SIR. This is wrong. We cannot be pressured this way.”
Hawa Mahal has 264 booths.
Rajasthan is expected to hold municipal elections soon, with the state assuring the court that elections to urban local bodies will be completed by April this year.
BJP councillor: ‘No agenda’
BJP councillor Suresh Saini told Newslaundry that the party’s booth level agent filed objections against 467 voters on Kumar’s booth on January 8 and January 9, most of them naming Muslim voters. “I don’t have any agenda against Muslim voters. But I am 100 percent sure that these voters do not live here. We want to file objections against more voters, thus will request for extension of the deadline to file forms.”
As per the EC’s 2023 manual on electoral rolls, a booth level agent is not allowed to file more than 10 objections in a day during the claims and objections period. If more than 30 objections are filed during the entire revision period, the Electoral Registration Officer or Assistant Electoral Registration Officer shall “personally” cross-verify the matter.
Asked about this norm, Saini said he was unaware.
Vishal Saini, the BJP’s booth level agent for Kumar’s booth, claimed he had filed objections against “at least 200 voters” over two days, on January 8 and 9. Asked why he raised objections against so many voters when the BLO had just cleaned up the booth’s roll by deleting 124 voters in the SIR, he pointed to his own “ground verification” that “found that voters from another neighbourhood had migrated to this booth during the SIR but they don’t actually live here.”
“Since, the colony has mostly Muslim voters so it is obvious that majority of the objections would be against Muslims,” he added.
The draft rolls were published on December 16. The claims and objections round, which started subsequently, finishes today. District election officers will now verify the objections until February 7. BLOs are required to carry out fresh ground verification of each objection. If a voter cannot be located, a notice is issued asking them to appear for a hearing at the collector’s office, after which the ERO may strike their name off the rolls.
Phone calls to Electoral Registration Officer Sarita Sharma as well as all four AEROs in the constituency remained unanswered. A questionnaire was sent to Sharma. This report will be updated if a response is received.
A questionnaire was sent to MLA Acharya. This report will be updated if a response is received.
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