NEW DELHI: Days after the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission of India (ECI) to publish a list of 65 lakh deleted voter names in Bihar along with the reasons, the poll body, in a statement on Saturday, said that utmost transparency is the hallmark of electoral roll preparation, as per law, rules, and guidelines.The statement comes a day ahead of Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s fortnight-long Vote Adhikar Yatra, scheduled to begin on Sunday in Bihar.In a veiled reference to the allegations of the Congress on irregularities in voters’ lists, the ECI said it seemed to the panel that some political parties and their booth-level agents (BLAs) did not examine the electoral rolls at the appropriate time and did not point out errors, if any, to Sub-Divisional Magistrates/ Electoral Registration Officers, District Election Officers or Chief Election Officers. It further said that it continues to welcome the scrutiny of electoral rolls by political parties and any elector.Responding to the ECI, Congress general secretary K C Venugopal said the ECI has crossed all limits of shamelessness by shrugging all its responsibilities in the face of grave allegations of vote theft and mass rigging. Constitutional authorities are expected to be the epitome of probity – not hide behind vaguely drafted press notes to mask their guilt in destroying democracy, he said in a statement.The tone and tenor of the press note raise greater suspicions that the ECI will take no steps to address the public’s grave concerns about mass-scale vote rigging allegedly done by the BJP-controlled poll body, he said.“If the ECI ‘welcomes the scrutiny of electoral rolls’, the Chief Election Commissioner and other ECs must come clean on why they still refuse to provide parties with machine-readable electoral rolls and why CCTV footage is being deleted,” Venugopal added.The ECI, in its statement, reiterated that pure electoral rolls strengthen democracy, and political parties are involved at each stage of their preparation. “Appropriate time and opportunity are given to electors and political parties to rectify errors, if any. The election system for Parliament and Assembly elections in India is a multi-layered decentralised construct as envisaged by law,” it said.
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