Agartala, Sept 25:
The Tripura Pradesh Congress on Friday staged a protest next to the Election department in Agartala against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, demanding his removal and alleging that recent revelations about dissent within the Election Commission of India had raised serious questions over the functioning of the poll panel.
Congress workers, led by Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee president and former MLA Ashish Kumar Saha and senior party MLA Sudip Roy Barman, raised slogans against the CEC and burnt his effigy during the demonstration.
The protest followed an investigation published by a national daily which reported of at least 14 instances over a 10-month period in which fellow Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally recorded their objections, alleging that key decisions on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and centralisation of IT software were taken without their knowledge.
The report said the two commissioners had raised concerns over, among other issues, changes to voter-registration procedures, deletion of names and the centralisation of access to electoral-roll data.
The three-member Election Commission of India, one of the key constitutional institutions in the world’s largest democracy, is headed by Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, with Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi serving as Election Commissioners.
The Election Commission subsequently said that differences and observations were a normal part of institutional deliberations and maintained that decisions taken over the past year were unanimous decisions of the full Commission.
Addressing reporters during the protest, Roy Barman linked the reported internal objections to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s long-standing allegations concerning electoral irregularities and what the party calls “vote chori”.
“Whatever Rahul Gandhi has been saying for the last two-and-a-half to three years, the two other Election Commissioners have been saying the same thing for the last 10 months through their notes of dissent,” Roy Barman said, referring to the reported objections.
He alleged that the controversy had now gone beyond what Congress had earlier described as “vote theft”, saying, “Abhi ye to chori nahin hai, ye to dakaiti hai” (This is no longer theft; this is robbery).
Roy Barman, a former Minister, also alleged that the BJP had been defending the CEC instead of responding to the issues raised in the newspaper investigation.
“If the report published in The Indian Express is wrong, why has the Election Commission not contradicted it? Who is defending it? The BJP,” he said, alleging that the ruling party and sections of the media were misleading the public.
The Congress leader also referred to elections held in Bihar, Maharashtra, Haryana and West Bengal while reiterating the party’s allegations of electoral manipulation.
Calling for nationwide action, Roy Barman said the Congress was holding protests outside the offices of state Chief Electoral Officers to demand safeguards for free and fair elections.
He demanded not merely the boycott but the removal of Gyanesh Kumar from the post of CEC, and also called for criminal action against him, alleging that the poll panel under his leadership had acted against the interests of the country.
The Congress’s protest in Tripura was part of the party’s wider political campaign targeting the Election Commission following the reported dissent within the three-member poll panel. Opposition parties across several states have also demanded action against Kumar after the report was published.
