Voter ID haul: BJP, Cong trade poll rigging charges

BENGALURU/NEW DELHI: The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused each other on Wednesday of trying to rig elections due this weekend in Karnataka after the election commission said it had found nearly 10,000 voter identity cards stashed in boxes in a Bengaluru flat.

In a midnight press conference on Tuesday, Karnataka chief electoral officer Sanjiv Kumar said the seizures from a flat in Rajarajeshwari Nagar constituency included 9,746 voter cards and roughly a hundred thousand “counterfoils” that resembled acknowledgement slips issued while adding names to the electoral roll.

The incident triggered immediate reactions from the BJP, which, like the Congress, approached the poll panel in New Delhi on Wednesday. The BJP sought voting in the constituency to be countermanded, a request that the commission said would be decided upon once a report by a special observer it has dispatched to the state is received.

Karnataka votes on May 12 and results are expected on May 15. “An FIR is being regis- tered… preliminary verification suggests the ID cards are genuine but the significance of the counterfoils can only be verified after investigation,” said Kumar in a hurriedly convened press briefing around 11:45pm on Tuesday.

The controversy began earlier that evening when local media reported that members of the BJP, including former chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda, reached a flat in Jalahalli area and discovered the voter cards. Hours later, officials of the Election Commission also visited the flat. In the hours that followed, the BJP and the Congress accused each other of being behind a controversy to swing votes — an allegation they based on the identity of the owner and the tenant of the flat.

The owner was identified as Manjula Nanjamuri, who said that she won a civic election in 1997 with BJP support, and the tenant Rakesh, who identified himself as a BJP supporter in comments made to reporters on Wednesday.

Both the Congress and the BJP claimed Nanjamuri and Rakesh belonged to the other party.