Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convenor Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday accused the BJP of trying to manipulate voter list by deleting over 5,000 names from the voters list in the run up of the New Delhi Assembly constituency election, from where the former chief minister is contesting. Addressing a press conference alongside Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha and Delhi Chief Minister Atishi, Kejriwal claimed the BJP was trying to win elections through "unfair means" after failing to present strong candidates or issues.

Calling it BJP’s ‘Operation Lotus’ Kejriwal shared a data saying that a large-scale operation began on December 15, with 5,000 voter deletion applications and 7,500 addition requests filed so far in his New Delhi assembly constituency. He claimed this could alter 12 per cent of the constituency's votes. The total number of voters in the constituency, he said, is 106,873, as per the voter list published on October 29 after the summary revision, which was conducted between August 20 and October 20.

The BJP, however, rubbished the charges saying that AAP was the one trying to manipulate the voters list by adding names of minorities. South Delhi MP Ramvir Singh Bidhuri accused the Kejriwal and his party of enabling illegal voting practices by Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators. Refuting Kejriwal’s claims of voter list tampering, Bidhuri  alleged that AAP had deliberately facilitated the registration of illegal voters while Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said accused the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP of trying to register "illegal voters", fearing defeat in the Delhi Assembly polls. Sachdeva said in a press conference that his party would not allow "fake votes" to be cast in Delhi. “Lakhs of minority voters have been added to the electoral list after the Lok Sabha Polls. “Many Hindu voters living in areas that come under South Delhi, like Kalkaji and Tughlakabad, have made complaints that people from the minority communities are being registered as voters,” Sachdeva added.

Taking a dig at the BJP, Kejriwal said: “BJP has already lost the elections. They don't have a chief ministerial face or even proper candidates. They only aim to win through manipulation, but we won't let them succeed. Last time, they tried to remove the names of 11,000 voters from another constituency, from where we won the polls by 5,000 votes. If they would have been successful, we would have lost the election. The staff of the election offices had even started working on the deletion but due to the intervention of the Chief Election Commissioner, this was stopped.”

“ What is the need of the elections if such kind of activity is going on? They did this in Haryana and Maharashtra but we will not let them do this in Delhi,” he said.

 The former Delhi chief minister also alleged that the BJP had filed 11,000 voter deletion applications in one constituency alone, but the move was halted at Chief Election Commissioner's intervention. "We exposed this, and thankfully, it was stopped." "Operation Lotus has now reached my constituency. They are attempting to manipulate the electoral rolls to change the election outcome," Kejriwal alleged. "This kind of manipulation undermines democracy. We appeal to the Election Commission to continue its strict monitoring to prevent such malpractice," he said.

In a letter written to District Election Officer of New Delhi, Kejriwal has sought details of individuals (objectors) who have submitted more than five applications for deleting names since October 29, 2024.

“… the total voters in the New Delhi Assembly Constituency are 1,06,873 and total addition applications received from 29 October to 25 December are 7,876, which is 7.37% of the total voters and thus no addition can be done without the personal field visit by the AERO and personal 10% cross verification by the ERO. The ground-verification schedule of ERO must be shared with BLAs of all political parties in advance, so that representatives of political parties can accompany the said ERO during the process. Lastly, please note that your office is required to flag any critical influx of Forms 6, 7, or 8 in any assembly constituency to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) [Kindly refer to pant 11.4.7.(iv) of Manual on Electoral Rolls 2023]. I urge you to escalate this matter to the CEO at the earliest,” read the letter.

Criticising the Kejriwal, Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijendra Gupta said Kejriwal's accusations as an attempt to mislead the public. “it is well-known how Arvind Kejriwal and AAP leaders added the names of thousands of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis to voter lists using fake documents. When the BJP uncovered this, it lodged a complaint with election officials, who initiated actions to remove these fraudulent names. All these Rohingyas and Bangladeshis form AAP’s vote bank, and seeing this slip away has created an atmosphere of panic among AAP leaders, leading to their disturbed mental state,” he said.