NEW DELHI — Kirti Kumar, a Booth Level Officer (BLO) from Rajasthan’s Hawa Mahal Assembly constituency, has threatened to take his life after he was reportedly forced to delete 470 Muslim voters from his booth.
“I will visit the collector’s office and will kill myself there,” Kirti Kumar can be heard shouting over a phone call in a video circulating on social media.
Kumar alleged that he is being threatened and pushed beyond capacity to look into BJP’s objections seeking the deletion of 470 voters – nearly 40 per cent of his booth – from the draft electoral rolls published after the Special Intensive Revision. He alleged these requests target Muslim voters and that he had already verified all these voters, Newslaunday reports.
Hawa Mahal is a Muslim-majority constituency that BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya – locally referred to as “Maharaj” – won in the 2023 assembly elections by a margin of just 974 votes. Acharya, the chief priest of Jaipur’s Dakshinmukhiji Balaji Temple, has since drawn repeated controversy over actions and remarks ostensibly targeting Muslims. Acharya once targeted vendors selling meat on the streets and asked officials to close down such shops.
In April last year, Acharya, along with his supporters, had allegedly raised offensive slogans at the Jama Masjid in Jaipur after the Pahalgam attack.
Kumar can be seen, in a viral video, shouting on a phone call, saying, “Maybe I should remove voters from the entire basti, that can help you as well as Maharaj win the election comfortably,” reportedly speaking to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) councillor Suresh Saini.
According to a Newslaundry report, a BJP booth-level agent has filed objections against 467 voters in Kumar’s booth between January 8 and January 9, most of them being Muslims. However, Councillor Suresh Saini has maintained that they don’t have an “agenda” against Muslim voters and have filed objections on the suspicion that the voters in question don’t actually live there.
Kumar, who is an English teacher at a government school, has said that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has already affected his students, and he has been asked to verify the 470 forms in two days, adding to the pressure.
workload had already left his students affected. And now he has been told by “senior election officials” to process these 470 forms “within two days” – work which he describes will take at least 78 hours since it takes 10 minutes to digitise each form. This is “like repeating the entire exercise again,” he said.
“And then I have to hit the ground again to verify these voters. This is like repeating the entire exercise again. I cannot do this. Humara pehle hi khoon jal gaya SIR mai…BJP politicians are threatening us that they will get us suspended. I know their politics very well. I have informed my seniors that I cannot do this,” BLO Kumar said as reported by Newslaundry.
According to the report, BLOs from five neighbouring booths, with a majority of Hindu voters, have received no objections, while another BLO, Saraswati Meena, received 158 objections with “all of them against Muslim voters filed by the BJP agents.”
At least three BLOs have died in Rajasthan amid allegations about work pressure and the way the SIR was conducted, from app glitches to inadequate training.
