Popular YouTuber Dhruv Rathee has waded into the controversy over voters’ lists that national opposition parties including AAP have highlighted.

With the Delhi Assembly election due on February 5, AAP leaders have doubled down on their allegations of large-scale voter deletions and additions to give the BJP an edge.

Chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar had on Tuesday dismissed allegations of manipulation in the electoral roll. He had underlined that no deletion could occur without thorough documentation, field verification, and giving the concerned individual an opportunity to be heard.

The national Opposition is not impressed.

Delhi chief minister Atishi, in her recent letter to the chief election commissioner, said that “between December 15 and January 2, applications for adding 10,500 new voters to the New Delhi Assembly constituency” were submitted.

She feared the addition of 10,000 new voters in a constituency with one lakh voters would “completely alter the election outcome”.

AAP leader Sanjay Singh claimed that the BJP tried to delete his wife’s name from the electoral rolls amid alleged deletion of Purvanchali voters in Delhi.

While AAP’s claims have been branded as “baseless” by poll officials, YouTuber Rathee, in his new video uploaded on Thursday night, declared that the concerns could not be brushed off so lightly.

He highlighted a few stories of people’s names allegedly being deleted.

Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, on December 18, 2023, Mumbai’s Simantini Dhuru had just received her new voter ID card. However, on polling day, the award-winning documentary director was shocked to discover that her name was deleted from the electoral rolls, as it was recorded that she was dead.

Later, it was allegedly found that someone named Keval Chiman Shah – who remains untraceable – had ordered the deletion of Dhuru’s name.

Dhuru is not the only victim, Rathee said in his video.

The names of lakhs of voters have been and are being deleted from electoral rolls in the same process, he claimed. “Tampering of the voter lists is being done systematically,” he declared..

The targeted voter deletions impacted election results, Rathee claimed as he scrutinised the BJP’s performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. He claimed that “32,706 voters were struck off the lists” months before the saffron party won the Farrukhabad Lok Sabha seat “with just a margin of 2,678 votes”.

The most number of names were deleted from the Aliganj constituency, where around 30 per cent of the voters belonged to the Yadav and Muslim communities, he declared.

According to a report in the website Newslaundry, before the election, BJP MLA Satyapal Singh Rathore wrote to district administration and expressed concern about “bogus voters”. Within two weeks of Rathore’s letter, “277 voters were removed from four booths in Aliganj,” Rathee claimed.

According to Newslaundry, all the four booths concerned “housed voters only from the Yadav, Shakya, Jatav and Muslim communities”.

Rathee mentioned that in previous elections the BJP received fewer votes at booths where deletion occurred in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. For instance, in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, while the Samajwadi Party got 426 votes, the BJP received 181 votes at booth 208, he claimed.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, 12 per cent of voters deleted from the list belonged to booth 208. During their door-to-door survey, Newslaundry claimed that three voters were labelled as dead while “40 others were said to have changed their address”.

Allegedly, none of these voters received any notices after their names were removed.

Rathee claimed that the BJP would have lost the Farrukhabad seat if the election had not been manipulated.

Similarly, he pointed out that the BJP won the Meerut seat with a margin of only 10,585 votes. “However, before the election, 61,365 voters were deleted from the voter list,” claimed Rathee.

“In the Meerut Cantonment Assembly segment, where 16, 521 voters were deleted, 30 per cent of the voters belonged to the Dalit and Muslim communities,” Rathee claimed.

In Hapur, where people from the Dalit and Muslim communities comprised over 50 per cent of the voters, 3.2 per cent voters were deleted, he claimed.

Rathee referred to Poonam Aggarwal, who was the BLO at booth 304 for more than a decade. In an interview with Newslaundry, Aggarwal recounted that before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, she had signed Form 6, the application to register new voters, in bulk.

Rathee also recalled deletions that occurred in Delhi’s Khajuri Khas Assembly segment during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

On polling day, siblings Farah and Rubeena Khan found out that their names appeared deleted on electoral rolls. “I have voted in every election since 2019, how can my name be suddenly deleted?” Farha Khan was quoted as saying by Scroll.in

“My parents and my brother could vote. How is it possible that three people in the same home are on the [voters’] list and two are not?” she wondered.

Even stranger was Hyacinth Pinto’s case. Although the then 60-year-old had been a presiding officer in a polling booth in Panjim during the last general elections, her name was nowhere to be found. She was surprised.

“It was not only me but several Catholic voters whose names were deleted from the rolls fearing that they wouldn’t vote for the BJP,” Pinto told Behan Box.

The Election Commission has maintained that there has been no malpractice in any of the elections and accused vested interests for maligning India’s robust electoral process.

Rathee lives in Europe.