BJP moves CEO against Telangana CM over voter roll remarks

The party claimed that the chief minister threatened people in rural areas that they will not get the benefits of the government's welfare schemes such as 'Kalyana Lakshmi', 'Shaadi Mubarak' and 'Indiramma' housing.

Hyderabad: Alleging that Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy had threatened voters with denial of welfare benefits if they were not included in the voters’ lists during SIR, the BJP on Saturday, July 25, urged the state Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) to issue a notice directing him to withdraw his remarks.

In a memorandum and a video submitted to the CEO, Telangana BJP’s Election Commission Affairs Committee Chairman Marri Shashidhar Reddy claimed that the CM threatened people in rural areas that they will not get the benefits of the government’s welfare schemes such as ‘Kalyana Lakshmi’, ‘Shaadi Mubarak’ and ‘Indiramma’ housing.

“This video exposes the gravity of the threat of the Chief Minister,” the memorandum said.

“Threatening citizens with the withdrawal or denial of such government welfare benefits based on where they choose to register as voters is legally flawed and violates established electoral and constitutional principles.”

Such threats raise severe concerns in view of the provision of “undue influence” under election law and also because of the disconnection between welfare benefits and voter registration, it added.

If such statements are deliberately made by the Chief Minister during an active election cycle or a sensitive administrative roll-revision phase like the SIR, they are “intimidatory”.

The BJP urged the Election Commission to immediately issue a notice to the Chief Minister on various alleged violations and “insist that he should, through the electronic media and his social media handles, to rescind from his earlier statements and clarify to people that voter ID is not mandatory for any government scheme”.

It also requested the CEO to release a video for electronic media and publish it across all social media handles of the CEO Telangana, explicitly citing the clarification issued by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar that “a voter ID card is not mandatory for government schemes”.