Patna: Water cannons were used against Bihar Congress functionaries led by state party chief Rajesh Ram during a protest here on Friday against what the party alleged was the arbitrary functioning of the Election Commission. The protesters demanded the resignation of chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.The protesters alleged that the electoral process had been tampered with and that crores of voters’ names were removed from the electoral rolls through the SIR exercise to benefit BJP and its allies in assembly and parliamentary elections.Calling the SIR exercise “arbitrary” and alleging that it was conducted in violation of electoral law, the protesters also demanded that elections held in states, including Bihar, on the basis of electoral rolls prepared through the exercise be cancelled or countermanded and fresh elections held.“The CEC Gyanesh Kumar has been running the Election Commission arbitrarily. He has also conducted himself without any sense of responsibility to the Constitution and the lawfully sanctioned consensus that has to be maintained among the three election commissioners, including the CEC. The two other election commissioners recorded 14 objections in the last 10 months,” Ram said.He alleged that Kumar was “compromised” in upholding the electoral interests of BJP and had put democracy at risk by deleting crores of voters from the electoral rolls.Election Commission, however, has said that queries, observations and written notes by its members are part of its internal deliberative process and that decisions of the commission, including those related to the SIR, had legal backing and were taken unanimously.A heavy police contingent was deployed along the route. Police erected barricades near the MLC quarters to stop the march. When protesters resisted, police used water cannons and prevented them from proceeding further.The protest was held as part of a nationwide agitation called by Congress following LoP Rahul Gandhi’s news conference in Delhi on Thursday. The party had asked its state units to hold simultaneous protests in state capitals.In Patna, the march began at R-Block crossing and was scheduled to conclude outside the office of state chief electoral officer after passing through Atal Path. The protesters raised slogans against CEC and included women workers and functionaries.Those who participated in the protest included Purnia MP Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav; senior party functionaries Kapildeo Prasad Yadav and Kripanath Pathak; MLA Manoj Biswas; former MLA Pratima Kumari Das; party media department chairperson Rajesh Rathore; Bunty Choudhary, Rishi Mishra, Sanjay Yadav and Minnat Rahmani, among others.
