Kapurthala, September 23
Following complaints pertaining to largescale bungling in enrolment of “bogus voters” for the Kapurthala Assembly segment during the recent revision of electoral rolls, a team of five officers from the Election Commission held an inquiry into the matter here today.

The five officers included three officers from New Delhi and two from the Chandigarh office. The team included Mr Babu Lal, Additional Chief Electoral Officer, Chandigarh.

The team arrived late last night and held meetings with Mr Davinder Kumar Dhadawat, Election Observer, Mr Dilraj Singh Sandhawalia, Electoral Registration Officer, and Mr Rakesh Kumar Verma, Deputy Commissioner, this morning. The officers scrutinised all papers, held meetings with leaders of Opposition parties and prepared a report that they said would be presented before the Chief Election Commissioner.

In an interesting development, the Electoral Registration Office that had received as many as 8,627 applications for enrolment of new voters has finalised a list of only 785 voters.

The office had also received 2,777 applications for deletion of votes but the officers have cancelled just 396 names.

Thousands of remaining applications were, thus, found to be bogus. When asked as to how the number came down so drastically, the local officers said they had scrutinised each application.

They said many applications did not bear the complete information such as address, voter card number and other important details.

As a result, all such applications had to be rejected, they added.

The election observer, Mr Dhadawat, remained tightlipped today as he said he was not authorised to talk to the Press.

He said officers from the Election Commission had come but he could not make any facts public at this stage.

Today’s developments have raised the spirits of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) leaders as they had been alleging foul play by the ruling Congress party.

Dr Daljit Singh Cheema, secretary of the party, said the party’s stand had been vindicated and they were satisfied with the action taken by the Election Commission and Electoral Registration Office.

In a written complaint to the Chief Election Commissioner on Tuesday, the SAD president, Mr Parkash Singh Badal, had alleged that bogus applications were being sent to the office wherein the house numbers, father’s names and husband’s names had been willfully avoided.

He had also pointed out that some of the factories that had been closed since long had hundreds of fresh voter applicants.