CONGRESS President Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday called for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s immediate removal over alleged SIR “irregularities” and also demanded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation on moral grounds for ‘pressuring’ the poll panel chief. In his opening address at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting here, Kharge also put forward five demands of his party,including making public the complete data regarding every major change made to the electoral rolls and providing political parties with the electoral rolls and relevant data in a simple format and in a timely manner. Kharge also demanded an independent and time-bound inquiry wherever evidence of serious discrepancies emerges. have been removed must be fully informed and given an opportunity to appeal, and there must be such transparency in the critical data and decisions related to the election process so that no party has grounds to claim that information is being withheld, the Congress chief said. Most importantly, the voters of India must have confidence that their vote is secure, Kharge said. “We do not view this issue merely as a battle to win or lose an election. Elections come and go, and governments change, but democracy and the Constitution are enduring. This is the foundation of Indian democracy.

 

We must convey to every citizen that in a democracy, the most powerful person is the ordinary voter -- not the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister, or a leader in power,” he said. The CWC meeting, chaired by Kharge, is being attended by former party chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, party general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Jairam Ramesh, KC Venugopal, Sachin Pilot, Mukul Wasnik, and senior leaders P Chidambaram, among others, attended the meeting. Chief ministers of Congressruled States -- DK Shivakumar (Karnataka), V D Satheesan (Kerala), A Revanth Reddy (Telangana) and Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu (Himachal Pradesh) -- also participated in the meeting. EVM, VOTERS’ LIST ‘MATCH-FIXING’ GOING ON: RAHUL LEADER of Opposition Rahul Gandhi told the Congress Working Committee on Tuesday that EVM and voters’ list “match-fixing” of polls was underway in the country and asserted that his party should not budge from the path of “virodh” (opposing) as well as “pratirodh” (resistance) from streets to Parliament, sources said.Speaking during CWC meeting, Gandhi also said that revelations about the EC were now coming out in the open because of the Congress. Rahul pointed out that the Congress had been raising the “vote chori” issue strongly and talked about irregularities in polls in Haryana, Karnataka and Maharashtra.