By Abhik Deb
Farha Khan, a resident of Shri Ram Colony in Delhi’s Khajuri Khas area was furious when Scroll spoke to her on Tuesday afternoon. Three days before, on May 25, when Khan went to vote at a polling booth in the North East Delhi constituency, the 25-year-old found that the word “deleted” had been printed across her name on the electoral rolls.
Farha’s sister, 28-year-old Rubeena Khan, had also met the same fate. The two sisters could not vote and the polling officers at the booth could not explain the reason why their names had been deleted.
“I have voted in every election since 2019, how can my name be suddenly deleted?” Farha Khan wondered. “My parents and my brother could vote. How is it possible that three people in the same home are on the [voters’] list and two are not?”
The Khan sisters were not the only ones in Khajuri Khas, a Muslim-dominated locality, who found on the day of polling that their names had been deleted from the electoral rolls. The matter was first flagged by volunteers of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India who had set up help desks outside polling booths of the North East Delhi seat.
“This time, we found an unusually high number of voters whose names had been deleted,” Yogesh Swamy of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India told Scroll. “These people had no clue about this. They came to know only at the polling booth.”
Swamy contested the North East Delhi constituency as an independent candidate, since the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India is not a registered party.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
