Sources said the INDIA bloc will jointly take forward the fight against CEC. LoP Rahul Gandhi said, “Vote chori is a crime against people and a direct attack on our Constitution. BJP, RSS and EC who organised it have committed act of treason. Justice will be served.” Mamata said Kumar should be arrested, while TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee demanded a “look out circular” be issued against the CEC to prevent him from “fleeing”.Stalin said Kumar had no right to continue in office and must resign. He sought a fair probe “into everything that transpired within EC”, adding those responsible should be held accountable. Terming the reports’ findings “explosive”, he said it cast “serious doubts” over the results of every assembly election held after the SIR exercise.Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and MP Abhishek Singhvi said the opposition has been raising questions about the fairness of elections and EC’s role for a long time, but their concerns went unheeded.“Misuse of Form 6, misuse of software, tampering with voter lists, decisions without transparency – these are all now in front of the country. Then what did the CEC do about these objections? In the first three phases of SIR, 13.8 crore names were removed from draft electoral rolls of 31 states and UTs.”
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Party general secretary K C Venugopal said, “How the hell can one man, acting on his master’s orders, strike off names at whim? How can he sideline fellow constitutional officers to take blatantly illegal steps that put our democracy in danger?”Singhvi said the revelations are an example of a “double bulldozer sarkar”. He said while an external bulldozer works against institutions, an internal bulldozer is CEC who bulldozed his own organisation and colleagues and “hijacked” EC. He said SC has clearly ruled that all election commissioners, including the CEC, function on equal footing, and the revelations about the watchdog’s functioning show that election commissioners S S Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, who dissented against the CEC were in a majority.