Voters in Bengaluru’s Shivajinagar allege people posing as govt officers collected data

Residents in Bengaluru’s Shivajinagar have alleged that a group of people claiming to be booth level officers turned up at their homes on the pretext of updating the voter’s list and deleting voters in the third week of October. The allegations were raised by residents of Mackan Compound in Shivajinagar in Bengaluru and corroborated by Geetha V, an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker who is a booth level officer in the area.

“A few people had approached voters in my area asking for details including Aadhaar number and voter ID number,” Geetha told TNM. “When I cross-checked, I found that at least 20 people who were marked for deletion from the electoral rolls were still living in the constituency,” Geetha said.

As part of her responsibilities as a booth level officer, Geetha is a single point on-ground verification official for the Election Commission. In an urban centre, each booth level officer services an area, called a polling part, of roughly 1,200 voters, or 300-400 households. Months before the election, Geetha is tasked with voter registration, field verification, correcting identity cards, distributing voter slips and voter education.

Residents raise alarm about voter verification

Though the formal voter verification process began on November 9, after the draft electoral roll was published, residents in Shivajinagar raised an alarm that unknown people had visited their homes in October on the pretext of updating voter lists. “Officials claiming to be from the BBMP came to our home claiming that they will delete us from the electoral list. Our neighbours informed them that we are living nearby but the officials did not reach out to us. Now, we don’t know whether our names have been deleted from the voter list or not,” Zareena Taj, a 34-year-old resident of Shivajinagar, told TNM.

Another resident Afroze Pasha said that those who had turned up for verification in his home were discussing chalking his name off the electoral rolls. “They were talking about deleting my name when I was standing in front of them!” said Afroze Pasha, a 42-year-old caterer living with his joint family in the same area in Shivajinagar. 

The developments in Shivajinagar come at a time when TNM was investigating a major privacy breach in Bengaluru involving a private NGO that has covertly collected personal information from thousands of voters in the city. On August 20, BBMP issued a Government Order allowing an NGO named Chilume to ‘create awareness’ about voter rights and revision of electoral rolls. But going beyond their brief, in an act of illegality, the NGO signed sub-contracts with other agencies and employed hundreds of field agents. The field agents, who were issued fake ID cards identifying them as government officials, made voters share personal information such as their Aadhaar number, voter ID number, phone number and address. Voters were also made to answer subjective questions about the performance of their elected representatives.

Though it is unclear if Chilume or any of its sub-contractors were involved in the exercise in Shivajinagar, many residents complained that the ‘booth level officer’ said that names of voters will be deleted. 

Salma Sulthana, 31, a homemaker, said that it was an arduous task to convince the officials who had turned up that her family members were still living there. “I was home when the people verifying voters living in this house came. This was not the BLO who regularly comes to our place. They were talking about the deletion of voters even though I was trying to reassure them that we are all living here and that my husband, brother and father had gone out for work,” Salma told TNM. 

Party workers from the opposition alleged that the private survey was used to bolster a complaint filed with the Election Commission on October 11 claiming there were defects in the electoral roll of the Shivajinagar Assembly Constituency. 

The complaint filed by seven people, Afsar Pasha, Bhaskar D, Girisham N, Shrikant S, Mohammed Inayath, Sheikh Dawood and Anwar Basha, all residents of central Bengaluru, alleged there were defects in the electoral roll of the Shivajinagar Assembly Constituency. “We carried out our own survey in the constituency from February this year and found 26,000 voters in the constituency to be fake. A majority of the voters we suspect are from the Muslim community. We want the electoral rolls in this constituency to be verified again,” Girisham N, one of the complainants, and a BJP sympathiser, told TNM. 

The incident has taken on a political colour with the Congress alleging that the sequence of events is to ensure that certain clusters of voters are deleted from the electoral list. The complainants meanwhile alleged that Congress workers were disrupting the voter verification exercise turning away BLOs who turned up for voter verification. 

Suhail Ahmed, Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), Shivajinagar, however denied claims about a covert voter verification exercise in Shivajinagar. “If there are complaints from voters about people other than BLOs turning up to do voter verification, we will look into it. So far, we have not received any such complaints and the formal voter verification process is only beginning from this week,” he told TNM.

This story is a part of TNM’s series on Voter Fraud Investigation.