Arrest CM Bommai for this 'electoral malpractice', demands Congress

The Congress on Thursday demanded the arrest and resignation of Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai alleging he is directly responsible for a corrupt electoral practice by assigning a private entity to collect door-to-door voter information.

Congress general secretary and the party’s Karnataka in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala said at a press conference in Bengaluru that Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, the civic agency, authorised a private firm in August to carry out a door-to-door survey of voters free of cost who gathered information about their gender, mother tongue, collected voter ID and Aadhaar details.

Alleging that “the chief minister was the conduit of the electoral fraud,” he said, “there has to be an FIR against Basavaraj Bommai and he should be arrested.”

The cache of data was not fed into the Garuda application of the government but into an application Digital Sameeksha of the private firm, Surjewala charged.

The firm also appointed hundreds of Booth Level Officers (BLO), which technically should be a government appointed persons, said Surjewala, adding that these BLOs were also given identity cards making it look as if they were government employees.

“We want to know who permitted a private entity to conduct the survey on behalf of the BBMP? Who recommended the government to give such contract to a private entity and why the antecedents of the contractor was not checked?” Surjewala said.

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According to reports, the BBMP later cancelled the permission to the private entity but gave no specific reason for the cancellation. The data collected by the private entity has not been recovered by the BBMP.

The private entity has been reported to be associated with political parties, as well as individual MPs, MLAs, corporators, local bodies and aspirants for election management.

(With agencies’ inputs)