New Delhi: Congress on Thursday once again doubled down its charge of alleged rigging in Maharashtra assembly polls and demanded the poll panel to provide the machine-readable, digital copy of the Maharashtra voter lists and video footage of polling day of Maharashtra and Haryana within a week from the date of this letter.
The letter to the EC was written after the EAGLE team of the party held a meeting on Wednesday evening as the poll panel – which has repeatedly and firmly denied the Congress and Rahul Gandhi’s claims that voter lists were manipulated and unverified individuals allowed to vote – sent the letter June 12.
It was marked as ‘received’ at his residence in Delhi and also sent to his e-mail address, sources had said.
In its letter to Ashwani Kumar Mohal, Secretary, Secretariat of the ECI, the party said that it is a group set up by the All India Congress Committee to co-ordinate matters and issues with the Election Commission of India (ECI) on behalf of the party.
It said that it wrote in response to EC letter dated June 12 to the Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi with an offer to meet and discuss the issues about the Maharashtra 2024 Vidhan Sabha election raised by him and the Congress.
The party pointed out that since December 2024 several letters, petitions, press conferences by leaders of the INDIA alliance bloc of political parties, articles and speeches on the floor of the Lok Sabha by the Leader of Opposition have put forth very factual issues concerning the sudden, huge increase in electors and voters for the 2024 Maharashtra assembly election and the inexplicable upsurge in polling after 5 pm on election day.
The EAGLE team which comprises of leaders like Ajay Maken, Praveen Chakrabarty, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Digvijaya Singh, Pawan Khera, Gurdeep Singh Sappal, Nitin Raut and Vanshi Chand Reddy, said that it is irrefutable from EC’s own data that there were more new electors added between the Maharashtra 2024 Lok Sabha election held in May and the assembly elections held in November than there were in the prior five full years between 2019 Maharashtra assembly elections and 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
“This has never happened before and defies basic common sense and logic. Who are these new voters and where did they emerge from?” read the letter.
The EAGLE team said that to investigate this thoroughly, any rational person would agree that the starting step is to compare the final electors list for Maharashtra 2024 Lok Sabha elections and final electors list for Maharashtra 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections.
This is precisely what the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi have been asking for seven months a digital, machine-readable copy of these two electors lists for an apples-to-apples comparison,” it said.
Taking a jibe at the poll panel, the letter read that it is intriguing and puzzling that except to provide these two voter lists, the Election Commission has engaged in all other sorts of responses, media leaks, and calumny.
“Why don’t you just give us the final voter lists as requested? Since you have evaded this for so long, we must ask the logical follow-up question-do you or do you not have these voter lists? In this context, not providing video footage of polling day raises further doubts and suspicion,” it said.
It also highlighted that it is neither helpful nor productive to deflect from our simple and straight-forward requests with long winded responses of the process of addition or deletion of voters or blaming a political party’s organisational functioning or claiming these voter lists were given to individual candidates and so on.
“We request you to provide us the machine-readable, digital copy of the Maharashtra voter lists and video footage of polling day of Maharashtra and Haryana within a week from the date of this letter. This has been a long-standing request which should be easy to comply for the EC,” the party demanded.
It also said that the Congress party leadership will be happy to meet with the EC soon after we have received these. “In that meeting, will even present the findings of our analysis to you,” it said.
