New Delhi: One Assembly constituency in Delhi's north-east accounts for the largest pile of deletion requests in the capital's electoral roll revision, and almost all of the third-party objections in it carry the same set of names.
In Mustafabad, 843 objections have been filed on Form 7 since August 31, the highest for any constituency in Delhi, according to figures compiled from the applications. Form 7 is the form a voter or an objector uses to seek deletion of an entry from the roll.
Of the 597 forms filed by third parties rather than by the electors themselves, 96 per cent name booth level agents (BLAs) of the Bharatiya Janata Party as the "objector". A total of 572 of those forms are against Muslim electors and are spread across 24 parts, the smallest geographical unit of an Assembly segment.
The grounds ticked on the forms are "absent" or "permanently shifted", and in some cases "death". Nearly 68 per cent of the Form 7 applications in Mustafabad name a BJP BLA as objector, the figures show.
The objections sit inside the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the exercise the Opposition has been protesting for weeks and which led the INDIA bloc to hold a "public impeachment" of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Friday.
Under the SIR, booth level officers visit households to verify electors. A deletion can be proposed by a political party's booth agent, by a neighbour, or by an elector of the same part. Once an objection is filed, the person named is served notice and given a chance to respond before the electoral registration officer decides.
Mustafabad has been a flashpoint in Delhi politics since the February 2020 riots, in which the constituency saw the heaviest casualties. Its electoral rolls have been contested ever since, with parties trading charges of bulk additions and bulk deletions.
What the latest numbers show is a pattern rather than an outcome: the objections are concentrated in a handful of parts, filed in a short window, and routed overwhelmingly through one party's booth structure. Whether they translate into deletions depends on how the claims are adjudicated.
The BJP has not responded publicly to the specific figures for Mustafabad. The party has consistently rejected allegations that the SIR is aimed at any community, and its leaders have described the roll revision as a clean-up of duplicate and ghost entries.
Delhi's electoral roll revision continues through the month, with the final roll for the segments due after the claims and objections window closes.