New Delhi, Sep 18 (IANS) Doubling down LoP Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi’s charge of systemic voter deletions during Karnataka Assembly elections in 2023, Congress leader Pawan Khera said that the Election Commission owes an explanation for such violation of electoral process and asked at whose insistence, voter deletions were ‘allowed’ in Aland constituency.

He also took the poll panel to task, alleging that it was not co-operating with the CID investigation into alleged voter deletions in Karnataka.

Speaking to IANS, Pawan Khera said that FIR was lodged for alleged irregularities in voter rolls only after Congress candidate B.R. Patil filed hundreds of petitions before the poll panel.

Raising a series of questions, Khera asked: “Isn’t it a fact that the Election Commission is not cooperating with the CID’s investigation? Isn’t it a fact that even after 18 reminders, the EC is not responding to CID’s demands? Isn’t it a fact that the poll panel was caught red-handed?”

Congress media and publicity department head, when questioned on Congress victory in the same elections, said that it was not a matter of poll defeat or victory but rather an issue of electoral probity, something for which the grand old party always stood for.

“It’s not a matter of victory or defeat. Congress won the elections and could have seen its victory margin rise by 10,000 more votes had there been no wrongdoing. The election process must be transparent and free of any flaws, the voter list should be clean,” he added.

Khera’s criticism of the poll panel follows Rahul Gandhi’s startling charge of vote deletion in Karnataka’s Aland constituency, where he claimed that more than 6,000 votes were deleted via ‘organised and systemic’ procedure, using online tools.

He claimed that mass vote deletions took place in Congress booths, through fake logins and by using phone numbers from outside the state and all these voters were INDIA bloc supporters.

For the unversed, Aland constituency in Karnataka, which Rahul purportedly described as a Congress stronghold, was won by Subhadh Guttedar (BJP) in 2018 and then subsequently by BR Patil (INC) in 2023 elections.

–IANS

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