Uttar Pradesh poll body says sorry for sharp replies on list mistakes

The Uttar Pradesh election authority said sorry on Tuesday for the sharp tone and harsh language of its recent online posts, which sparked a major row over wrong voter slip entries.

The Controversy

The dispute started after Aam Aadmi Party MP Sanjay Singh asked Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar about a bizarre slip where the name 'Ramhit Yadav' turned into 'Ram ne Yadav ko Maara' in the voter roll for the latest State Legislative Council polls. Mr. Singh accused the poll panel of working for a political party and asked if their computer had a caste bias. Navdeep Rinwa's team blamed a software glitch for the mess, explaining that the tool used to convert English names into Hindi read the words as a full sentence instead of just a name.

Sharp Replies

Instead of a simple reply, the U.P. Chief Electoral Officer's handle posted a mocking message on the social media platform X. They pointed out another weird entry where a voter's father named Ravi Sharma had his name wrongly saved as 'Ram ne Sharma ko Maara', adding that machines do not care about caste. In a second mocking post, the office wrote that they were lucky the entry did not read like a crime against a minority group, or else people would have called them communal too. On Monday, Mr. Singh held a press conference in Lucknow to call Mr. Rinwa an agent of the ruling party and demanded strict action.

The Apology

By Tuesday, Mr. Rinwa's office took down the harsh stance and posted an apology online. The poll office admitted that the sharpness and language of their previous comments did not match the professional standard expected from an official government handle. They stated that they noted the public anger and promised to keep all future online messages polite and formal.

Context

State election offices use automated software to handle millions of names during voter list updates, which sometimes leads to strange machine translation errors. Government social media accounts are expected to follow strict rules of neutral and polite communication, making sharp or sarcastic remarks from official handles a rare and controversial matter.