Hyderabad: Hyderabad Lok Sabha Congress in-charge Mohammed Waliullah Sameer on Thursday, 5 November, accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of deliberately maligning Hyderabad’s Old City. He said the BJP had repeatedly alleged that Rohingya Muslims and illegal Bangladeshi immigrants were enrolled as voters. According to him, the SIR findings in Hyderabad exposed a politically motivated campaign to defame the city’s predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods. He also demanded a public apology from BJP leaders.
Sameer was reacting to a clarification that Hyderabad District Election Officer and GHMC Commissioner R.V. Karnan issued on Wednesday. He said the official confirmation had demolished the BJP’s longstanding allegations. Officials had detected no illegal immigrant on the electoral rolls of the district’s 15 Assembly constituencies. “Now, the election authorities’ own verification exercise has failed to establish even one such case. Who will take responsibility for defaming our city and its people?” he asked.
He pointed out that Karnan had categorically denied finding any Bangladeshi nationals or Rohingya Muslims on the rolls. Officials identified only about 10 to 12 Nepali citizens in Sanathnagar as foreign nationals. They had entered India legally, Sameer said, but officials removed them from the rolls because they did not hold Indian citizenship.
Sameer said the findings were significant in the context of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s 2 November statement at a BJP rally in Hyderabad. Shah had claimed that the nationwide SIR exercise identified nearly three crore illegal infiltrators, largely Bangladeshis. He had also accused the Congress of protecting them for electoral gains. “If Amit Shah claims that three crore infiltrators were found, he must produce constituency-wise evidence,” Sameer said. He asked how many were actually foreigners and how many were merely absent, shifted or untraceable voters.
SIR findings Hyderabad: 9.19 lakh exclusions questioned
The Congress leader said the controversy gained greater significance because of the exclusion of nearly 9.19 lakh electors from the draft rolls of Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency. He said 9,19,088 names were missing, about 39.46% of the constituency’s pre-revision electorate of 23.29 lakh. Yakutpura recorded the highest exclusion at 1,54,982 electors, followed by Chandrayangutta with 1,48,869 and Malakpet with 1,47,799. Karwan accounted for 1,41,766 exclusions, Bahadurpura 1,21,350, Goshamahal 1,10,148 and Charminar 94,174.
“Nearly four out of every ten voters in Hyderabad parliamentary constituency were missing from the draft rolls. Yet the authorities found no Rohingya or Bangladeshi voters in Hyderabad district,” he said. He asked how many genuine Indian citizens the exercise had wrongly excluded. He also demanded clear answers from the Election Commission.
Sameer said the Hyderabad findings reinforced Rahul Gandhi’s repeated allegations of “vote chori”. They also raised serious concerns about electoral roll revisions, he added. He called for an independent investigation into what he termed a contradiction between the BJP’s claims and the local findings. Deceased voters, shifted residents, duplicate entries, untraceable electors and foreign nationals, he stressed, are entirely different categories. “An absent voter is not an infiltrator,” he said.
He alleged that BJP leaders had repeatedly targeted Charminar, Yakutpura, Chandrayangutta, Bahadurpura and other Old City neighbourhoods. In his view, they did so to create suspicion about residents’ citizenship. “They are not required to prove their patriotism whenever the BJP wants to polarise voters,” he said.
Sameer also highlighted the hardships that daily-wage workers, small traders, elderly citizens and poor families faced during electoral verification. He demanded that the Election Commission publish a constituency-wise breakdown of the 9.19 lakh exclusions and independently review potentially wrongful omissions. He also asked it to ensure the restoration of every eligible voter’s name. “Electoral roll revision must protect democracy, not become an instrument of political intimidation,” he said.
