DMK invites TVK to participate in all party meeting regarding SIR
The DMK-led Tamil Nadu government has extended an invitation to actor Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) for a crucial all-party consultation meeting aimed at forming a unified stance against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state.
The meeting, scheduled for November 2 at a private hotel in Thiyagaraya Nagar, Chennai seeks to bring together all political parties in the state to “prevent” what the ruling Secular Progressive Alliance has termed a “conspiracy to deprive the people of Tamil Nadu of their voting rights.”
This development follows a high-level consultation chaired by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on October 27 with leaders of the Secular Progressive Alliance.
In a strongly-worded joint statement issued after the meeting, the alliance accused the BJP government at the Centre of a systematic effort to “destroy the dignity of democracy” by bending autonomous bodies to its will, citing the recent voter list revision in Bihar as a “clear example” of this strategy.
The core of the opposition’s argument rests on the experience of Bihar, where the SIR process allegedly led to the mass deletion of genuine voters. The joint statement from the DMK-led alliance explicitly alleged that the revision in Bihar targeted Muslims, Scheduled Castes, and women, echoing senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan’s allegation that 80,000 Muslim voters were sought to be deleted from a single constituency.