Aland ‘vote chori’: SIT cites CCTV footage from ex-BJP MLA’s home

The existence of this CCTV footage and the recovery of a Digital Video Recorder from the home of Guttedar was cited by the government prosecutor on Thursday to oppose the anticipatory bail pleas filed by Guttedar, his son Harsha Guttedar and an associate, Tipperudra, in the Aland case.

The special court hearing the plea adjourned the hearing while directing the SIT to submit the case diary on the investigations conducted so far in the case of the attempt to illegally delete 5,994 voter names in Aland. The court also observed that the criminal sections invoked in the case were all bailable.

The irregularities in the Aland electoral list were one of the instances mentioned by senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi of alleged “vote chori” at a press conference last month. A case was registered in the matter on a complaint by Election Commissions officials in February 2023, ahead of the May 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls.

Guttedar, a four-time Aland MLA, his son, who is a zilla panchayat representative, and Tippuredra, a contractor, sought anticipatory bail in the wake of recent searches by the SIT on properties linked to him and his associates. In their plea, the three have said that the 2023 FIR in the Aland voter deletion case did not name them, and called the case politically motivated as the original complainant was Congress Aland candidate B R Patil. The Congress leader won from Aland in 2023, defeating Guttedar.

The government countered this Thursday, saying the case could not be seen as politically motivated as the FIR had been filed by local EC officials after a preliminary inquiry on Patil’s complaint.

The prosecutor added that the SIT had found evidence of attempts to burn voter lists outside Guttedar’s house in Aland, ahead of its raid there. “The DVR from the residence of the petitioner has been recovered and sent for forensic analysis. A mirror image of the DVR which has been retrieved under due process has revealed the burning of materials,” said the prosecutor.

Guttedar has also contested the searches conducted at his Aland house as illegal claiming that the SIT had only obtained search warrants for properties linked to him in Kalaburagi.

During the hearing, the special court raised questions about the delay in investigation into the “vote chori” FIR, given that it was registered in February 2023. The prosecutor told the court that the delay was on account of police awaiting responses from the EC to letters seeking digital information regarding voter apps and portals.

“The SIT is expecting a response from the EC at the earliest,” the prosecutor said.

The Aland case had come to light after local Congress workers insisted on verification of deletion requests made regarding voters in the constituency, after coming across proof that the people in whose name the requests were made and those whose names were sought to be deleted were both in the dark on the matter.

A ground-level verification by EC officials subsequently found applications submitted remotely to delete 6,018 names across the 254 Aland election booths, of which only 24 were found to be genuine as the people concerned no longer lived in the constituency.

The EC returning officer then filed a police complaint on February 21, 2023 against unknown persons under IPC sections dealing with impersonation, providing false information, and forgery.

An SIT was constituted on September 26 this year to investigate the case, due to the slow progress since 2023, and it conducted searches in the third week of October on properties linked to Guttedar, Harsha, and another of his sons, Santhosh Guttedar.

The SIT also found that the applications were made from a data centre in Kalaburagi, with Rs 80 paid per deletion.

Guttedar, who lost to Patil by 10,348 votes in 2023, has denied any links to the Aland illegal voter deletion attempt. Following SIT raids, he said: “They did not get anything… They alleged that we burnt documents. In everybody’s house there is a cleaning process for Deepavali and the same has happened at my house. It is trash that was burnt.”