Nirmala Sitharaman Alleges Widespread Voter Fraud in Tamil Nadu, Targets MK Stalin’s Kolathur Win
FM exposes 7 lakh duplicates, questions DMK victory.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has unleashed a blistering offensive against Tamil Nadu's ruling DMK, directly accusing Chief Minister MK Stalin of securing his Kolathur constituency through widespread electoral malpractice involving bogus and duplicate votes, while slamming the party's protests against the Election Commission's voter list purification drive as a desperate cover-up for its failures.
Sitharaman disclosed alarming statistics during her press interaction, highlighting that Stalin's own stronghold of Kolathur harbors 4,379 duplicate voters, part of a statewide scandal involving over 7 lakh duplicates, 20 lakh entirely fake entries, and 35 lakh voters who have long since migrated elsewhere but remain on the rolls, raising pointed questions about whether these irregularities were instrumental in delivering Stalin's electoral triumph.
In a sharp rebuttal to Stalin's video message decrying the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as an assault on voting rights, Sitharaman demanded to know the real motive behind DMK's agitation—whether it seeks to retain deceased individuals, relocated residents, or phantom entries to enable proxy voting and manipulation ahead of the crucial 2026 assembly polls.
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The ongoing second phase of SIR, launched on November 4 and set to conclude by December 4 across 12 states and Union Territories including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, and West Bengal, will culminate in draft electoral rolls on December 9 followed by final publication on February 7, 2026, with the DMK-CPI(M)-Congress alliance already challenging the process in the Supreme Court.
Drawing parallels with Bihar's recent cleanup that axed nearly 68 lakh invalid names from a list of 7.42 crore voters, Sitharaman cautioned that the DMK's resistance to transparency betrays a deeper anxiety about contesting elections on a level playing field, potentially igniting a fierce political showdown as Tamil Nadu braces for polls in 2026.
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