New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday alleged that the Telangana Rashtra Samiti was planning to manipulate the upcoming Telangana Assembly elections using a "contaminated" electoral list containing 70 lakh names whose status as voters was suspect.

The Congress has petitioned the Election Commission to thoroughly examine the list and purge it of fake voters.

According to the party, the Telangana government's decision to dissolve the Assembly this month was aimed at forcing early elections with the objective of exploiting the faulty list.

Ruing the manipulation of elections in "this dark (Narendra) Modi era", the Congress has urged the commission to completely sanitise electoral rolls before elections are announced.

It has presented alleged examples of duplication, sometimes with the assignation of different sexes to the same person, instances of inordinately large numbers of voters sharing the same address, voters whose husbands and fathers have the same name, and the like.

According to Congress politicians Abhishek Singhvi and Shashidhar Reddy, the rolls published by the Election Commission for Telangana on September 10 have at least 30.13 lakh duplicate voters. Besides, the number of voters has surprisingly fallen from 2.81 crore in 2014 to 2.61 crore in 2018.

When the Congress approached the state election commission on September 5, it was told the reduction in numbers owed largely to migration to Andhra Pradesh following the June 2014 bifurcation.

However, even Andhra Pradesh has witnessed a reduction in the number of its voters by nearly 17 lakh, suggesting the migration argument is invalid, the Congress says.

"What's more surprising is that around 18 lakh voters are found to be (on the rolls for) both Andhra and Telangana," Shashidhar Reddy said.

"For example, the seven mandals of Khammam district which have been transferred to Andhra have more than one lakh voters. The names of these voters have not been deleted (from the list) in Telangana. The CEOs (chief electoral officers) of both states claimed them as voters of their respective state."

Reddy added: "The telescoping of the process of voter verification and retrospective revision from a period of four months to four weeks violates the guarantee of free and fair elections, as indeed the constitutional provision of 'one citizen, one vote'. There are other absurdities. For example, the ages of close to 21,000 voters have been shown to be above 100 years.

"It is clear that the caretaker chief minister of Telangana is sacrificing the integrity of the elections for the sake of his petty political ambitions. The Supreme Court (observation) that the purity of elections is the essence of democracy and (that) pure electoral rolls are the hallmark of purity is being sent for a toss in Telangana."

According to the Congress, the state government had in 2015 ordered the chief electoral officer of Telangana to delete 15 lakh names from the rolls for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections.

"Was it the purpose behind the deletion to disfranchise those who did not vote for the TRS?" Reddy asked.

"The exercise was stopped by the Election Commission after an investigation on a complaint by the Congress, which resulted in the transfer of the municipal commissioner."