4.5 million names at risk: Karnataka CM's dharna forces EC action on fake Form-7 voter deletions

Karnataka Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar staged a five-hour dharna outside the Chief Electoral Officer's office in Bengaluru on Thursday, alleging a conspiracy to strike around 4.5 million eligible voters off the state's electoral rolls through bulk, pre-printed Form-7 applications.

The chief minister, joined by former chief minister Siddaramaiah, KPCC president B.K. Hariprasad, Deputy Chief Minister G. Parameshwara, cabinet colleagues and Congress MLAs, demanded FIRs and immediate arrests before calling off the protest. He had put a cabinet meeting on hold to stage the demonstration.

The allegation, first levelled by Rural Development Minister Eshwar Khandre, is stark: in his Bhalki constituency, 36 persons — mostly BJP workers, he said — filed Form 7 seeking deletion of 3,244 voters in a single day, with one person alone filing 241 pre-printed forms. The Congress says the targets are eligible voters from poor, minority, Dalit and backward communities.

Shivakumar's memorandum flagged a pattern: a surge of bulk Form-7 filings on September 22, 23 and 24 — the last days of the claims-and-objections window — with voter names and EPIC numbers pre-printed and the objectors' details filled in later. He sought constituency-wise and booth-wise scrutiny, and an inquiry into who supplied the voter data.

Hours after the protest, Chief Electoral Officer V. Anbukkumar issued a circular to election officers across all 224 Assembly constituencies: act under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 against anyone making knowingly false declarations in electoral forms, after inquiry under Rule 20 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Form-7 deletions were further restricted to deaths — with death certificates — or verified double entries.

The BJP has countered the charges, and Union Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy criticised the dharna. But the EC's own circular concedes the core of the complaint: bulk Form-7 filings that are "not genuine" were indeed flowing into election offices. Voter-roll manipulation does not need to succeed to corrode democracy — the machinery of deletion was already in motion.