Bangalore archdiocese says thousands of Christians, Muslims deleted from electoral roll ahead of Karnataka state polls
Indian voters queue to cast their ballots in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly Elections at a polling station in Bangalore on May 12, 2018. (Photo: AFP)
Several thousand voters belonging to religious minorities such as Christians and Muslims have been allegedly removed from electoral rolls in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.
The state currently ruled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is headed for polls in May and Christian leaders suspect deleting minority community voters could be a strategy to retain power.
A delegation from Bangalore archdiocese on Feb. 15 submitted a memorandum to the chief electoral officer (CEO) of Karnataka pointing out that a total of 9,195 voters’ names, of which about 8,000 were Christians and Muslims, were deleted from the final electoral rolls of the Shivajinagar constituency in the state capital, Bengaluru.
“We fear that [voters lists for] many constituencies across Bengaluru city could have been tampered with impunity. If such mischief is allowed to carry on unchecked, the confidence of the people in the electoral process will be destroyed beyond measure,” J A Kanthraj, public relations officer of the Archdiocese of Bangalore, said.
He said it appeared to be clear manipulation to prevent Christians and Muslims from casting their votes in the upcoming elections.
Repeated attempts by UCA News to reach the CEO did not elicit any response but Kanthraj said the top election officer suggested they hold camps across constituencies in Bengaluru so that people can find out if their names were deleted from the electoral rolls.
The archdiocese has undertaken such a campaign across parishes, Kanthraj said.
“We have been actively carrying out our campaign to check if names of Catholics from our parish are missing from the voters’ list,” Father Vivian Monis, parish priest at the city’s St Joseph Church, said.
Opposition Congress party legislator Rizwan Arshad who represents Shivajinagar said he was shocked to see that several thousand names of Christian and Muslim voters were missing from the revised electoral rolls of his constituency.
“This is a blatant attempt by the ruling BJP party to rob minorities of their fundamental right to vote,” he said.
Arshad filed a writ petition in the Karnataka High Court on Feb.9 alleging a political conspiracy to identify Christian and Muslim voters and deprive them of their voting rights.
Justice Michael F. Saldanha, a retired high court judge, told UCA News that the court must set up an inquiry committee “to probe this clandestine attempt to alienate minority voters and submit its report at the earliest possible date.”
If any manipulations are found, then strict measures must be passed to set an example for the whole country, Justice Saldana said.
“Over the years, I have witnessed this trend of missing names of minority communities from the electoral rolls. This is a conspiracy to disenfranchise the minorities so that the BJP can win elections easily,” he said.
John Dayal, the spokesman of the All India Catholic Union, said the illegal and unethical methods adopted by the government machinery in Karnataka, where the incumbent BJP government and the opposition Congress party are engaged in a tough fight, can be replicated in other Indian states.
“Deleting the names from the voters’ list is one of the many malpractices indulged by the BJP’s federal government. In the past six-seven years, I have seen how pliable bureaucrats are in the national and state election commissions and the election process gets manipulated and communalized,” the rights activist-journalist alleged.
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