Bengaluru: Form 7, the Election Commission’s statutory objection form, is arriving at booth offices in Karnataka and Telangana already filled, already signed, and already concentrated on minority names. Opposition parties say the form meant to clean the electoral roll is being used to empty it. The Bharatiya Janata Party says it is only doing what the law allows. Police in one district have stopped treating the distinction as academic.
On 2 October the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee placed copies of the forms before the press in Mysuru. Spokesperson M. Lakshmana said the applications carried Muslim names and had been submitted by BJP booth-level agents to booth-level officers. In the Babaleshwar constituency, 1,363 Form 7 applications were reported to have come from just ten electors. In Bidar, a businessman alleged that more than 3,000 voters, including himself, had been marked shifted or absent through the same channel. In Belagavi, police have registered cases against BJP leaders for allegedly attempting, with false documents, to delete minority voters. The offences cited include forgery and cheating.
The Telangana allegation is smaller and no less pointed. In Musheerabad, Congress said BJP booth-level agent S. Balachander submitted pre-printed Form 7s seeking deletion of 30 votes of a single family, among them a Congress booth-level agent. Similar claims of mass filings aimed at Muslim voters have surfaced in Bhadrak, Odisha, and in West Bengal, where submission of the forms was accompanied by clashes between Trinamool Congress and BJP workers. Karnataka’s chief electoral officer has directed electoral registration officers in all 224 constituencies to proceed against knowingly false declarations.
Form 7 is prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Rule 13(2) requires that an objection be filed by a person already on the roll of that constituency. The objector must tick a ground — death, under-age, permanently shifted or absent, duplicate enrolment, or not an Indian citizen — and sign a declaration. A false declaration is punishable under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, with imprisonment of up to one year, or a fine, or both. Filing the form does not itself delete a name. Section 22 of the Act empowers the electoral registration officer to correct or delete an entry only after inquiry, and only after the elector has been given an opportunity to be heard. Rules 18 to 20 require listing, notice to both sides, and a summary hearing; evidence may be taken on oath. An appeal lies under Rule 23 within 15 days. Section 32 exposes an officer who breaches his duty to criminal liability.
Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and D. K. Shivakumar have called the filings a conspiracy to disenfranchise legitimate voters and have sought a time-bound criminal investigation. The BJP has rejected the charge. It says Form 7 is a statutory right, that submission is not a crime, and that its workers are identifying duplicates and voters who have shifted. Party leaders in Karnataka accuse the Congress government of pressing the Commission and the police into false cases against workers engaged in routine roll-cleaning.
Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa has noted that Commission instructions have long limited how many forms a single elector may file, and that Section 31 has rarely been invoked. A penal clause that is not used does not deter a pre-printed stack. The objector signs and leaves. The voter, if the notice reaches him, must prove a residence he was already occupying, then appeal within a fortnight. If the notice does not reach him, he learns of his deletion at the polling station.
The Election Commission says the bulk applications are under scrutiny. Scrutiny does not restore a name. Until Section 31 is applied to a false declaration as readily as Form 7 is applied to a voter, the roll’s correction mechanism remains what the Mysuru copies suggest it has become: a faster route out of the list than the route that put the citizen on it.