Amit Malviya, head of the BJP’s information and technology department, has criticised former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi for his praise of the anti-corruption protests in Nepal that resulted in a regime change.

Malviya also accused former CEC O.P. Rawat and former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa of not lifting “a finger to clean up our compromised voter lists”.

All three targets of Malviya have questioned the manner in which the EC has taken on Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi over his allegations of electoral registration fraud as well as his criticism of the implementation of the document-based special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar.

The BJP leader posted clips of Quraishi’s news interviews on X. In one of them, Quraishi replies to a question on Nepal saying: “This (developments in Nepal) is a sign of a very living and vibrant democracy and not anarchy.”

In another clip, he speaks of an election in Uttar Pradesh where the EC gave presiding officers at polling booths a list of voters believed to have shifted or died. Quraishi said this helped officials prevent bogus voting and that a politician privately told him that the EC had thwarted bogus voters arranged by him.

Malviya wrote: “Former CEC S.Y. Quraishi calls the recent developments in Nepal a sign of ‘vibrant democracy’ — not anarchy. But given his record, this reckless comment is hardly surprising.

“It was during Quraishi’s tenure that the Election Commission of India signed an MoU with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) — an outfit linked to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, a known deep state operator and a close associate of the Congress party and the Gandhis.”

In 2012, the EC had signed an MoU with IFES — a US-based international non-profit funded by several governments — one of 31 such publicly disclosed international pacts for “experience sharing, capacity building, technical cooperation and exchange, visits and study missions”.

Malviya also pointed out that at the time Quraishi mentioned, the Samajwadi Party was in power in Uttar Pradesh. He asked why the former CEC had shielded the unnamed leader who spoke to him.

The BJP leader added: “If Quraishi knew about shifted, absent and dead (SAD) voters on the rolls, why did he never order a Special Intensive Revision (SIR)? He was EC from 2006-2010 and later CEC from 2010-2012 — it was his constitutional duty to act!”