EC holds talks with parties; RJD presses for post-Chhath elections, raises concern over voter roll deletions
PATNA — The BJP on Saturday urged the Election Commission to hold the upcoming Bihar assembly elections in one or two phases, and to ensure that women in burqas are properly verified against their voter ID photographs at the polling booths.
After a meeting with the visiting EC team, led by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, state BJP president Dilip Jaiswal said, “We have urged the Election Commission to conduct the elections in one or two phases. The election process need not be staggered. Also, tallying of faces of voters, especially burqa-clad women, must be ensured with respective EPIC cards so that only genuine voters get to exercise their franchise.”
The EC, which is on a two-day tour of the state, held talks with representatives of recognised political parties ahead of the announcement of election dates, PTI reported.
The RJD delegation was headed by Abhay Kushwaha, the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, who was accompanied by spokespersons Chitaranjan Gagan and Mukund Singh.
When Kushwaha’s attention was drawn to Jaiswal’s contention on burqas, he snapped, “This is a political conspiracy. Only recently has the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls been carried out. New EPIC cards are to be issued to all voters with fresh photographs. Identification of voters is no big deal. But the BJP wants to push its own agenda”.
The RJD leader, however, disclosed that, like the BJP, “we urged the EC to consider holding the polls in not more than two phases, since not much time is left (for expiry of the term of the current assembly)”.
It was also the RJD’s contention that the polls be held after Chhath, the state’s most popular festival, held six days after Diwali, which falls at the end of October this year.
Jaiswal, too, had said that the BJP delegation urged the EC to ensure “no further delay in polling dates than the mandatory 28-day gap between the date of announcement of elections and the day on which voting begins. So, if elections are announced in a few days from now, polling should begin November 3-4 onwards”.
Smaller parties like Union Minister Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and INDIA bloc partner CPI(ML) Liberation also told the Election Commission that they were in favour of assembly polls being held in “not more than two phases”.
Both the BJP and the RJD acknowledged that there were a large number of villages in Bihar, with a sizeable population of weaker sections who were “intimidated” during polls.
The RJD, which has been voicing apprehensions that the SIR might have been carried out to help the BJP-led NDA, also urged the EC to divulge details of the 3.66 lakh persons whose names were deleted from the final electoral roll published earlier this week.
