After voters found at Delhi addresses, DEO orders field verification of deletion claims

After 28 voters in Delhi’s Mustafabad constituency against whom deletions had been sought were found living at their registered addresses, the office of north-east Delhi District Election Officer (DEO) Ajay Kumar said on Saturday (October 31, 2026) that election officers would visit every elector against whom a Form 7 application had been filed “to ascertain the genuineness” of the claim before deleting any name from the electoral roll.The DEO’s office also said it would initiate “action under the rules” against those who had filed Form 7 applications if their claims were found to be false or “mischievous”.The DEO’s response came in reply to a post on X sharing The Hindu’s October 30 report that all 28 electors at polling booth 129 against whom Chandra Shekhar Nainwal, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) booth-level agent (BLA-2), had filed objections were living at their registered addresses.Moreover, nine fresh applications naming Mr. Nainwal as the objector appeared on the Delhi CEO’s October 30 list of deletion applications received. When contacted earlier, Mr. Nainwal had denied filing the forms and said he was neither a BLA nor associated with any political party.The DEO’s office said no bulk applications beyond the prescribed limits had been received, either online or physically, in Mustafabad. It also cited figures that differed from those available in public records, saying: “A total of 832 Forms 7 and 8 (102 Forms 8) have been filed/received in AC-69 up to October 30.”Senior ECI officials had told The Hindu that BLAs filing Form 7 applications as “objectors” themselves, without the prescribed undertaking for bulk submissions, were subject to the ECI’s October 9 directive capping individual applications at 10. DEO has yet to offer clarification on this.Till October 28, 19 BJP BLAs had filed 572 of the 843 Form 7 applications submitted against Muslim electors across 24 parts of the Mustafabad constituency. Officials said the applications lacked a BLA undertaking and were not submitted in the prescribed format.According to the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) list of Form 7 applications, 118 more objections were filed on October 29 and 30, taking the total to 961. Of these, 684, or 71%, were filed by the BJP BLAs, including 112 by the same 19 BLAs.Meanwhile, Ali Mehdi, the Congress candidate from Mustafabad in the 2025 Assembly election, said in a post on X that he had submitted a formal complaint to the north-east Delhi DCP seeking an FIR against BJP BLAs over alleged attempts at illegal deletion. Published - November 01, 2026 04:30 am IST