PoliticsUttar Pradesh
'How do they know the missing voters are Hindus?' Akhilesh asks Yogi over 1.27 crore claim
The Samajwadi Party chief says the Election Commission has shared voter-list data with the chief minister's office first, and that the BJP 'has effectively lost the election even before the voting'.
Key points
- Akhilesh Yadav asked how Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath knows that 1.27 crore missing voters are Hindus.
- He said the 1.27 crore deleted votes mean a loss of about 31,000 votes per constituency, and that the BJP wants to add 2 crore names.
- The Samajwadi Party alleges misuse of Form 7 to delete names; its account of an FIR is not independently confirmed.
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday asked how Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath could know that the voters missing from Uttar Pradesh’s rolls are Hindus, and accused the BJP and the Election Commission of working together.
Speaking at a party programme in Lucknow, Akhilesh said: “How do they know that the names of Hindu voters are missing?” Adityanath had claimed last week that the names of 1.27 crore Hindu voters had been deleted from the voter list.
Akhilesh went further. “It appears that the Election Commission has shared the entire data with the chief minister or the chief minister’s office,” he said, alleging that the data reaches the public only after it has gone to the chief minister first.
The BJP’s plan, as Akhilesh tells it
The SP chief said that during Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Lucknow for the BJP’s state working committee meeting, party workers were urged to help add 2 crore names to the rolls. He argued that the BJP had first used the “infiltrators” issue to back the special intensive revision, and had now switched to a Hindu-voter argument.
He did the arithmetic for his audience. Losing 1.27 crore voters, he said, would mean about 31,000 votes per assembly constituency, and the BJP “has effectively lost the election even before the voting has taken place.”
Form 7 and the Sultanpur case
The Samajwadi Party also alleges that Form 7, the objection form used to seek deletion of a name, was misused with forged signatures. Akhilesh cited Nand Lal Nishad, a Sultanpur resident, whose name was allegedly used on applications seeking the deletion of about 26 voters. Akhilesh honoured Nishad with a ₹1 lakh reward for helping expose the alleged fraud. He said SP workers caught the practice and the fake filings stopped, and demanded an Election Commission inquiry and action against those responsible. According to the party, the Commission has taken cognisance and an FIR has been registered. That account has not been independently confirmed.
Akhilesh also suggested that electoral rolls be linked to identity cards, pointing to the biometric and retinal data already collected from citizens, and warned that names missing after the revision could feed fears about citizenship.
What comes next
The fight is over the Election Commission’s revision of Uttar Pradesh’s rolls ahead of the 2027 elections. The reports available carry no response from the Chief Minister’s office or the BJP to Akhilesh’s remarks. With the 2027 assembly elections ahead, the rolls look set to be a main line of attack between the two parties.