BengaluruKPCC president B K Hariprasad on Monday defended the Booth Level Officers (BLO) holding mass enumeration processes at community halls, temple and masjid premises claiming that the officials have been unable to enter the slums and narrow bylanes of colonies to conduct house-to-house enumeration.“A lot of the BLOs have come to our workers claiming they are unable to enter the slums and minority colonies. For this purpose, our booth level agents (BLAs) have assisted them by holding these mass enumerations in temple premises, masjid premises and community halls,” said Hariprasad.The Congress MLC said the enumeration forms are not so easy to fill with even graduates unable to do it properly.“Now, imagine the plight of the illiterate and not so educated people? For this reason we have been holding these camps to assist the people. The Congress is not against the SIR process and would definitely want the illegal votes added by RSS and BJP to be removed, to clean the voter rolls by removing those who are dead and also with duplicates in the rolls,” said Hariprasad.He said the election commission of India (ECI) has given specific powers to the political party appointed BLAs to help people door-to-door for filling the enumeration forms, to assist them in getting the duly filled forms to the BLOs.“From printing, distribution, matching, linking and collection of duly filled enumeration forms…BLAs can also collect the duly filled enumeration forms from the electors up to 50 numbers per day and submit them to the BLOs. These are rules formed by the election commission. With such being the case we do not understand what has been perceived wrong,” said Hariprasad.The KPCC president said the Congress party will also take a delegation later this week to the CEO and present their case against the opposition and justify their stand.Earlier, Hariprasad said the BJP was complicit in trying to add ineligible voters to the list in Jayanagar, Malleswaram and Mahalakshmi Layout which are represented by the BJP legislators.“In these constituencies the BJP BLAs accompanying the BLOs are threatening the voters to vote for the BJP or face the consequences of not being on the list. In Sadashivanagar, people are being forcefully added to the list while in Jayanagar people are being threatened physically,” alleged Hariprasad.Earlier, party state working president G C Chandrashekar claimed that the BJP-JD(S) were actively trying to undermine the CEO in the state and trying to bring outsiders to complete the exercise of SIR.“The BJP has not been constructive in their actions on SIR and only trying to blame the state government to ensure that outsiders come and complete the SIR process as per their requirements of deletions and additions to the voter list in Karnataka,” he said.Ends
