Hyderabad: Congress leader Mohammed Waliullah Sameer criticised AIMIM for not launching a sustained public agitation over the exclusion of 9.19 lakh electors from Hyderabad draft rolls. He urged continued efforts to restore eligible voters’ names before the final electoral rolls appear on November 9.
Sameer, the Congress in-charge for the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency, said 9,19,088 electors were classified as Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD). These names did not appear in the draft electoral rolls published on August 17 during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
According to Sameer, the excluded electors accounted for 39.46% of the constituency’s pre-SIR electorate of 23.29 lakh. He described the scale of the exclusions as unprecedented, saying nearly four in every 10 electors were missing from the draft rolls.
Yakutpura recorded the highest number of exclusions, with 1,54,982 electors. Chandrayangutta followed with 1,48,869, while Malakpet recorded 1,47,799 exclusions.
Hyderabad draft rolls: Congress seeks restoration of eligible voters
Sameer questioned Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi’s response to the issue. He argued that public statements and social media posts were insufficient when the voting rights of lakhs of people were at stake.
The Congress leader said his party had approached election authorities and raised objections to suspicious Form 7 applications. He added that Congress workers had helped voters resolve discrepancies in their electoral records.
Sameer clarified that the figures referred to exclusions from the draft rolls and did not represent final deletions. With publication of the final electoral rolls scheduled for November 9, he called for sustained efforts to restore the names of eligible electors.
He said the Congress would continue pursuing complaints and press the Election Commission to protect genuine voters. The party maintained that eligible electors should have their names restored before the final rolls are published.