Maharashtra Forest Minister and senior BJP leader Ganesh Naik was unable to vote in the Navi Mumbai civic elections on Thursday after discovering that his name was missing from the electoral roll.Naik said he had been voting for years at Navi Mumbai School No. 94 along with his family, but was informed this time that his polling station had been shifted to St Mary High School. However, when he reached the new location, he found that the room number assigned to him did not exist and his name was absent from the voters’ list.
“As a result, I could not cast my vote,” Naik told reporters outside School No. 94, smiling wryly. He said he planned to visit St Mary High School again to seek clarification. Claiming discrepancies in voter allocation, Naik said members of his family and relatives living in the same building had their names split across three different polling centres. Naik blamed the State Election Commission for the lapse.“If a minister like me can face a situation where his name is missing from the voters’ list, one can imagine what common voters might be going through,” he said.
“If a minister like me can face a situation where his name is missing from the voters’ list, then one can imagine what might be happening to common voters,” he said. Naik, who is in a bitter electoral fight with the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in the NMMC, alleged irregularities in the ward-formation and poll processes. “We all know the discrepancies in the ward formation process. But people have rejected money and such tactics,” he said.The BJP and Shinde Sena are contesting the NMMC polls independently after alliance talks failed. The BJP is contesting all 111 seats, while the Shiv Sena has fielded candidates in 105 seats. Voting for the NMMC and 28 other municipal corporations across Maharashtra, including the high-profile Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Thane, Nagpur, Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, began Thursday morning. Around 15,931 candidates are in the fray for around 2,869 seats.