Lucknow (The Hawk): A Samajwadi Party (SP) delegation will attend the Election Commission on Thursday to provide a written response to the notice issued regarding the claims that the BJP ordered the bulk deletion of Yadav and Muslim voter names from the electoral lists prior to the Assembly elections earlier this year.
According to top party leaders, the delegation will carry examples of the missing names and hand over the voter lists for the polling places where the names were abruptly removed.
Rajendra Chaudhary, the national spokesperson for SP, stated: "We will send over the documents to the commission on Thursday, in order to corroborate our assertions."
Ravidas Mehrotra, a former minister, said: "Actually, we had discovered this irregularity during the elections and had alerted our president of the country to it. He made his remarks in light of the input from the candidates. Given the short amount of time the party had to submit a response, we have now compiled the voter list and, to the best of our abilities, verified on the ground the names that were struck off."
The SP leadership had issued a circular to candidates who ran for office in the assembly on the party line, requesting that they provide supporting documentation.
A top leader overseeing the compilation process stated, "We have encountered instances where names, in some cases in the hundreds, were found to be struck off from the list of one booth at the last moment."
On October 27, the EC served SP national president Akhilesh Yadav with a notice asking him to provide proof of the claims that the names of nearly 20,000 Yadav and Muslim voters were removed from the voter rolls by the Commission at the BJP's request in every Assembly constituency prior to the election.
By November 10, the SP chief was requested to provide written evidence to support his claims.
At the party's national convention, which was held in Lucknow in September, Akhilesh made the accusations while addressing the attendees.
(Inputs from Agencies)