New Delhi: The Samajwadi Party (SP) on Friday (August 16) alleged that Muslim and Yadav election-related officials and supervisors were being removed and replaced by members of other communities for an upcoming by-poll for Uttar Pradesh’s Kundarki seat.
Uttar Pradesh is ruled by a BJP government run by chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
Kundarki is among the ten assembly seats in the state scheduled to hold by-polls soon. While nine seats were vacated after their sitting MLAs won their respective Lok Sabha constituencies, on one seat, the sitting MLA of the SP was disqualified.
Yadavs and Muslims, who together make up 28-30% of the state’s population, are considered the core support base of the SP. This perception exists – and has been fortified by the media – not just among ordinary voters, but also among officials who come from these communities, in a deeply divided and partisan bureaucratic setup.
Zia-ur Rehman Barq held the Kundarki assembly seat from 2022 to June 2024, when he was elected MP for Sambhal. The last time the BJP won the seat was in 1993. All MLAs for Kundarki have been Muslims from 1996.
With the by-polls round the corner, the SP’s UP president Shyam Lal Pal alleged in a letter to UP’s chief electoral officer that Yadav and Muslim booth-level officers (BLOs) and supervisors in Kundarki were being removed and replaced by non-Yadav and non-Muslim BLOs and supervisors in Kundarki in a bid to impact the election.
Pal submitted a list of 12 BLOs and supervisors who were recently replaced. This included ten Muslims, including supervisor Firoz Haider, who was allegedly replaced by one Sundar Lal Sharma.
Pal, however, said the list was not exhaustive, and alleged that many other changes had been made.
Changing BLOs and supervisors on the “basis of caste and religion” before the by-poll was “undemocratic and unconstitutional” and raised a question mark on free and fair elections, said Pal.
The opposition party, which along with the Congress won 43 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP in the recent general election, demanded a probe into the matter and strict punitive action against officials who allegedly replaced the BLOs and supervisors.
The state government and the Moradabad administration are yet to respond to the SP’s charges. The story will be updated with the UP chief election officer’s response.
A BLO is a local government or semi-government official familiar with local electors who assists in updating the electoral roll using his or her local knowledge. They are generally a voter in the same polling area in which they work and act as the Election Commission’s grassroots representative.
According to the Election Commission’s handbook on BLOs, they play a “pivotal role” in the process of roll revision and collecting actual field information with regard to the roll.
Each BLO has one or two polling stations under their jurisdiction. Those government and semi-government officials who can be appointed as BLOs include teachers, anganwadi workers, panchayat secretaries, postal workers, electricity bill readers, village level workers, lekhpals, auxiliary nurses and midwives, and health workers.
Among their duties is to visit the villages and hamlets under their jurisdiction and identify the names of dead or duplicate voters, or of those who have migrated out of the area.
