Chandigarh, Sep 25 Punjab Congress, led by state unit chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, staged a protest on Friday demanding the dismissal and arrest of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for allegedly subverting and sabotaging the nation’s electoral process, with the police using water cannons on protesters as they attempted to march towards the Election Commission office to surround it.
Numerous Punjab Congress leaders, party MLAs and workers gathered for the protest in Sector 17.
On Thursday, the Punjab Congress unit announced that newly appointed state in-charge Sachin Pilot would lead a protest march against CEC Kumar. However, on Friday, Warring took the lead in his absence.
Former chief minister and sitting MP from Jalandhar, Charanjit Singh Channi, was also not present.
As protesters tried to breach police barricades to march towards the state Election Commission office, Chandigarh police intervened.
Subsequently, several Congress leaders and workers were briefly detained by the police.
Before being detained, the protesting Congress leaders alleged that the electoral process had been rigged and the right to vote was being snatched from citizens.
Raising the “stop vote chori” slogan with other Congress leaders and workers, Warring demanded that Kumar be dismissed, an FIR registered against him, and he be arrested.
“Vote chori is happening in this country. The BJP is forming governments with vote chori. The SIR process must be stopped,” Warring stated.
Warring claimed that increasing evidence was emerging regarding how compromised the CEC was and how he was colluding with the BJP to facilitate electoral theft.
He remarked that such a situation has never occurred in the history of the country. “What is seen to be an electoral victory is actually the theft of the elections (vote-chori)”, he said, adding that this was evident in Haryana and Maharashtra.
Warring pointed out that nobody expected the BJP to win in these two states, especially after its significant losses in the parliamentary elections just months prior. He further alleged that the 2024 parliamentary elections were also manipulated.
He reiterated that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Punjab must be scrapped, claiming it was an instrument only to disenfranchise the genuine voters whom the BJP suspected would not vote for it.
He argued that the upcoming assembly elections in Punjab should be conducted using the previous electoral rolls from the parliamentary elections.
The PCC president also accused CEC Kumar of effectively denying first-time voters their right to vote by making the registration process for new voters nearly impossible.
He explained that the stringent conditions of Form-6 for first-time voters are practically unachievable. This, he claimed, is an attempt to disenfranchise the younger generation, Gen Z, as the BJP believes they will not support it.
Senior Congress leaders, including Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, Pargat Singh, Rana Gurjit Singh, Dharamvira Gandhi, Vijay Inder Singla, Raj Kumar Verka, and Balbir Singh Sidhu joined the protest.
Randhawa mentioned that Rahul Gandhi has been stating for the past three years that the Election Commission of India is colluding with the BJP to rig elections.
He claimed that both the BJP and the Election Commission of India have been exposed in front of the country’s citizens.
According to Randhawa, they have severely damaged the credibility of elections in India, and it will take considerable time to restore that credibility. He insisted that the first step to repairing the broken electoral system in the country is to remove the current CEC.
On Thursday, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi claimed Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi have endorsed what he has been saying for over a year: that the country’s electoral system has been “destroyed”, after revelations came out in a media report that they red-flagged issues of deletion and addition of votes through Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
(PTI News)
