Bengaluru: Foreign nationals accounted for just 0.007% of the nearly 1 crore names deleted from Karnataka ’s electoral rolls during the special intensive revision (SIR), with officials identifying 716 such cases in an exercise that resulted in 99.76 lakh deletions, including 16.39 lakh that were dead.
The coastal districts had 71 Nepalese citizens on the rolls, including 37 in Udupi. BBMP North alone had 545 Nepalese citizens with voter IDs. In BBMP Central, at least 25 cases emerged from just two polling booths, an official said.
Union home minister Amit Shah has described SIR as essential to prevent foreign nationals from influencing democratic decisions, arguing that “only Indian citizens should determine who governs the country”. Officials said most of those identified were Nepalese citizens or people with Indian origins who now retained citizenship of another country. Others were citizens of the US, Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, South Africa and Norway. One citizen each from Bangladesh and Pakistan was identified.