BJP, Congress trade poll rigging charges over Karnataka voter ID haul

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 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 registered… 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. “Congress is losing public support and they are trying hard to rig the upcoming elections in Karnataka by undemocratic ways. So, we demand countermanding of polls in Raj Rajeshwari Nagar constituency,” said Union minister Prakash Javadekar shortly after midnight on Tuesday.

By Wednesday morning, BJP president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi made similar attacks at their arch-rival, which is in power in Karnataka.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala refuted the allegation and said the opposition party staged the episode to divert attention. “Apartment No 115 from where the ID cards were recovered belonged to a BJP corporator, Nanjamuri. The BJP leadership is lying and trying to disassociate itself from its ex-corporator Manjula,” he said.

Police officials did not confirm if Rakesh was the tenant. Nanjamuri told news agency ANI that she rented the flat out to two other individuals whom she identified as Rangaraju and Rekha. Her son, however, said Rakesh was a relative.

Congress leader Anand Sharma, who met election commission officials in New Delhi on Wednesday, said the discovery of the voter cards was staged by BJP since the flat had not been raided by the poll watchdog.

Members of the BJP, including Union ministers Smriti Irani, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, JP Nadda, Dharmendra Pradhan and SS Ahluwalia also met the election commission on Wednesday.

In Bengaluru, CEO Kumar reiterated that none of the voter cards seized were fake and there had been no breach in the election commission’s systems.