Imaginary people, hidden scandals on MP voters’ list

‘‘I live here with my wife, our three sons and their wives and two unmarried daughters. My grandchildren are not old enough to vote. Yes, legally eight other persons, the family of my nephews, can claim a right to part of the house but they don’t live here.’’

Then who are the rest, who figure as residents of this house, on the voters’ list of Manegawa, the constituency of Madhya Pradesh Speaker Sriniwas Tewari? He, like everyone else in the village, is baffled by the names. ‘‘These are not residents of the village, we don’t know these names,’’ he says.

At the village itself, the houses are not numbered and the only indication that this house corresponds to the number on the voters’ list are the names at the beginning of the list. Nand Kumar is listed at house number 214 and the list for house number 215 begins with his wife Devwati. Interspersed among the over 1,200 entries, stretching over 15 printed pages, are the names of the 10 residents of this house.

An inquiry ordered by the Election Commission has already found that the enumerator never visited the house. BJP leaders, however, believe they know why this house was chosen. Across the road from the house, is the Shriyut College named after Tewari. In Manegawa, Shriyut is the term used to address Tewari.

Local BJP leader Girish Gautam says that the intention was to ensure that the college would be used as a pretext to herd the extra names on the list. He adds that despite complaints dating back to September, the numbering used for the enumeration has not been marked on the houses so that the confusion could be used to explain this discrepancy.

The example of house number 215 is not the only one. In booth 141, house number 171 has been shown with 53 residents, of which only the first 7 are genuine. According to Gautam, the owner of this house works as a gardener at the Sriyut college.

Tewari is a big name here, he is ‘Dada’. Dada na hoi daui aai, vote na deb tau aai (Not Dada but god has come; even if we don’t vote for him he still wins) goes the local Bagheli saying.

He, however, won the last Assembly election by just 294 votes. Rewa is one of three districts targeted by the Election Commission following allegations of irregularities but Tewari’s Manegawa stands out for the scale.

Just a few kilometres from Nand Kumar’s house lies the village of Uccha Tola, the native place of Tewari’s personal assistant and confidant Satyanarayan.

At Uccha Tola, the voters list has listed 1,074 voters for the polling booth while the total population, Gautam claims, is only 600.

A visit to the village by The Sunday Express confirms what he says.

Tewari says, ‘‘Let the BJP level charges. There is no truth in any of the allegations. These are all printing mistakes and I myself sent a fax to the Election Commission in this context on February 16. Would I do this if I had been responsible for the problems?’’

But the Election Commission had frozen the process of preparing voters list on February 3 and had ordered a detailed inquiry.

Documentary evidence submitted by the BJP to the EC cite many such instances which cannot be accounted for by computer error.

The Sunday Express found several such cases. Sumeshwar Kori is a Dalit resident of Hinauti Kothar village.

He came back home one day in September to find a copy of the hand-written enumeration list left with his wife. It listed his name, his wife’s name and the name of a Brahmin as residents of his house.

A complaint was made and the enumerator Narendra Prasad Pandey was suspended for a month. He was reinstated and placed in charge of receiving complaints about the voters’ list after January 20 at the same polling booth.

In several booths, the names are on the voting list of two different constituencies in Rewa district.

For example, polling booth 155 for Manegawa and polling booth 153 for Rewa have 34 names, the father’s name the same, in common. There are hundreds of such cases.

Even Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, while giving a clean chit to the Khargone and Shahdol collectors, has admitted that there may be problems in a few areas of Rewa.

Despite ‘the problems’, he has so far refused to take action against former Rewa collector Vinod Kumar who was transferred in the last week of February.