HYDERABAD (The Thursday Times) — Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said on Monday that 30 million of the voters struck off India’s electoral rolls were “Bangladeshi infiltrators”, and dared opposition leader Rahul Gandhi to debate the purge in a special session of parliament.
“Now, I’m coming to what is causing a stomach ache for Rahul Gandhi. Three crore votes were those which never existed. These votes were those of Bangladeshi infiltrators,” Shah told a rally at Mozamjahi Market in Hyderabad. “Should we not remove them from the rolls? But Rahul ji says we shouldn’t remove them.”
He said the Bharatiya Janata Party would remove “every infiltrator from the electoral rolls”, and that the rally the opposition INDIA bloc held in Delhi on Sunday was meant not to save votes but to save infiltrators who form the vote bank of “Congress and company”.
Shah’s breakdown of the 130 million
“Rahul Gandhi says that 13 crore people have lost their vote in the country. He is lying,” Shah said. Of those 130 million, he said, 61.5 million had moved to a different place, 28 million to 30 million had died and 10 million were duplicate voters. The remaining 30 million were the people he called infiltrators.
The figures are his own. The opposition accuses the Election Commission of using the Special Intensive Revision of the rolls to delete 132 million voters, and has staged a mock impeachment of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over it.
“I challenge you from Hyderabad’s soil. If you have the courage, come for this discussion,” Shah said, offering a special session on the revision, infiltrators and electronic voting machines. He said Gandhi would not come “because he knows that only anarchy keeps Congress in the news”.
He rejected the charge that the BJP was winning because of the revision, saying Prime Minister Narendra Modi had won in 2014, 2019 and 2024 with no such exercise. “Now we are going to win Telangana too,” he said.
