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The party has also sought the Election Commission’s intervention in the “strongest possible manner”, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said.

The Congress on Sunday accused the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government of trying to vitiate the assembly polls by “manipulating” voters’ lists, and sought the Election Commission’s intervention in verification and sanitisation of electoral rolls.

“The TRS dissolved the Telangana assembly prematurely to swing elections in their favour by manipulating and contaminating the voters’ list,” said Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi at a news conference.

“Any election held on the basis of these deeply and deliberately flawed and inaccurate voters’ list would undermine the entire process and would lead to a distorted mandate. It would be a fraud on democracy and on the people of the country,” he said.

Accompanied by senior Congress leader from Telangana M Shashidhar Reddy, Singhvi said the move will not only further deepen the doubts of the common electorate in the electoral process, owing to such glaring anomalies, but further erode the faith that the people of this country need to have in the institution of the Election Commission.

Singhvi claimed that there were around 70 lakh discrepancies in the voters’ list in Telangana. Out of those, names of over 30 lakh voters were duplicated and 20 lakh deleted on the pretext that they have left for Andhra Pradesh, he added.

“But the same have not been added to the voters’ list of Andhra Pradesh. Besides, the names of around 18 lakh voters were found in the electoral rolls of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh,” the Congress leader said.

The Congress is likely to move the court to ensure that the alleged discrepancies and anomalies in the electoral rolls are corrected before the elections . The party has already moved a petition in the Supreme Court on the alleged discrepancies in electoral rolls in poll-bound Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

Singhvi said the Congress has demanded that thorough process of verification and sanitisation of the voters’ list be initiated before the elections are announced.

First Published: Sep 16, 2018 18:51 IST