The Congress on Sunday said the photograph of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, hanged by the British in 1931, had been placed against the name of a voter in the SIR draft rolls of Ludhiana district. The claim was denied by the Ludhiana district election office, which called it misleading and said the incorrect image had already been corrected during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

What the Congress alleged

Sanjay Talwar, the Ludhiana Congress district president (urban) and former MLA from Ludhiana East, said a suspected discrepancy had been found at Booth No 38 of the East constituency, where Bhagat Singh’s photograph appeared instead of the actual voter’s photograph at serial number 422. He said incorrect photographs had also come to light at serial numbers 5, 69, 397, 410, 747, 750, 983 and 990, and demanded a thorough scrutiny of the voter lists for all 235 booths in Ludhiana East.

Ludhiana MP Amrinder Singh Raja Warring also raised the issue on X, questioning how such errors were occurring in voter lists, who would investigate them and whose accountability would be fixed. He said there could be no compromise on the purity of the voter list in a democracy.

Poll body’s response

The district election office said the wrong photo was in the earlier electoral roll and had been carried into the draft roll published on August 13. It was detected during SIR verification and has already been corrected, and the final roll with the correct photo, to be published on October 12, has already been prepared. The Punjab state electoral office is set to publish the final voter rolls on Monday following the SIR exercise.

Talwar said that if so many irregularities could be detected during the inspection of just one booth, the entire constituency’s rolls deserved scrutiny. He tied the issue to broader concerns raised by Gandhi about alleged vote theft and irregularities in voter lists, saying such errors could not be taken lightly in a democracy.