Delhi DEO orders field checks before any voter name is deleted in Mustafabad

The north-east Delhi District Election Officer's office has ordered that election officials visit every elector against whom a Form 7 objection has been filed in Mustafabad before any name is removed from the electoral roll. The direction follows a report that all 28 voters at polling booth 129, whose deletion had been sought, were found living at their registered addresses.

In a statement on Saturday, the office of DEO Ajay Kumar said the field visits would be made 'to ascertain the genuineness' of each claim. It also said it would initiate 'action under the rules' against applicants if their claims were found to be false or 'mischievous'. The statement came in reply to a post on X sharing The Hindu's October 30 report on the 28 electors.

According to the report, the objections at booth 129 were filed by Chandra Shekhar Nainwal, described in records as a Bharatiya Janata Party booth-level agent, BLA-2. Nine fresh applications naming Mr. Nainwal as the objector later appeared on the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer's October 30 list of deletion applications. When contacted, Mr. Nainwal 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 said 832 Forms 7 and 8, including 102 Forms 8, had been filed or received in AC-69 up to October 30. The report noted that these figures differed from those available in public records.

Senior Election Commission of India officials had told The Hindu that booth-level agents filing Form 7 applications as objectors themselves, without the prescribed undertaking for bulk submissions, would be covered by the ECI's October 9 directive. That directive caps individual applications at 10. The DEO has not yet offered clarification on this point, according to the report.

Figures available till October 28 showed that 19 BJP booth-level agents 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.

The Delhi CEO's list of Form 7 applications showed that 118 more objections were filed on October 29 and 30, taking the total to 961. Of these, 684, or 71%, were filed by BJP booth-level agents, including 112 by the same 19 agents, according to the report.

Separately, 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 Deputy Commissioner of Police. He sought an FIR against BJP booth-level agents over alleged attempts at illegal deletion of names from the electoral roll.

The electoral roll process allows objections to be examined before any deletion. The DEO's order makes field verification a step in that process in Mustafabad. The office has not said how long the verification will take or how many officials will be deployed.