Hyderabad: Telangana Congress senior leader and spokesperson Syed Nizamuddin on Monday accused the BJP of attempting to misuse the Form-7 process during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and demanded immediate seizure of all pre-printed and bulk-prepared voter deletion applications across Hyderabad.
He said the larger and more serious question was how electoral-roll data was accessed, organised household-wise, printed in bulk and converted into ready-to-sign Form 7 applications. He said the Congress had placed before chief electoral officer on Oct 1 Form-7 applications from Musheerabad in which the names, addresses and electoral details of a Congress booth-level agent and more than 30 members of his family had allegedly been printed in advance. “This was not a voter sitting at home and filling a Form-7 from personal knowledge. He also demanded that fresh bulk Form-7 applications should not be accepted until the authorities established and recorded their chain of custody. Referring to CEO’s clarification that a Form-7 does not automatically result in deletion, Nizamuddin said the Congress was not questioning the existence of the scrutiny process but was raising a more fundamental issue. “The CEO has explained what happens to a voter after a Form-7 is filed. We are asking what happened before the Form-7 reached the booth.
Because form-7 was meant to be an individual objection based on a specific ground, not a mass-produced political instrument, he said this distinction was crucial. Because they could reveal who prepared them, how voter data was sourced and whether the exercise was centrally organised, nizamuddin said there were apprehensions that thousands of Form-7 applications had been printed but had not yet been submitted and were now more important than those already filed.
Addressing a media conference at Gandhi Bhavan, Nizamuddin said the issue was no longer confined to whether an individual voter would eventually be deleted after scrutiny. Only the objector’s name was entered by hand, and the person shown as the objector was a BJP booth-level agent, according to him. He said the Congress wanted every pre-printed, bulk-copied or single-person batch of Form-7s to be immediately impounded, photographed and sealed before the evidence disappeared.
Someone first extracted the electoral data, sorted an entire family, printed the forms and then left only one blank for the objector’s name,” Nizamuddin alleged. Who downloaded the roll? Who selected the family? Who printed the forms? Who distributed them? And on whose instructions?” he asked.