New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), on Tuesday, alleged “manipulation” of electoral rolls of South Delhi Lok Sabha seat with about 1 lakh names being deleted from the voters’ list in the constituency in the past one year. The party claimed BJP to be behind it.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rubbished the charge and hit back at AAP, accusing it of resorting to “lies” to keep itself in the race for the 2019 polls.

“Our estimate is that about 1 lakh names of voters from South Delhi alone have been deleted in the past six months to one year,” said Raghav Chadha, AAP’s South Delhi Parliamentary seat in-charge.

He claimed to have statistics that shows around 7,500 names being deleted from the electoral rolls of Chhattarpur; 12,000 from Bijwasan; and 6,000 from Tughlaqabad Assembly segments under the South Delhi Lok Sabha seat.

An average of 10,000 voters’ names were removed from every Assembly seat in the past one-and-a-half years alone. With 10 Assembly segments in one Parliamentary constituency, it comes to about 1,00,000 votes, he charged. “BJP now realises that it is going to face a massive defeat in the 2019 elections. They are so baffled by this that they are getting names deleted from the electoral rolls,” Mr Chadha alleged.

The Delhi BJP general secretary, Ravinder Gupta, alleged that AAP was “lying” on the issue.

“They have nothing else except lies to offer. The fact is that they are worried about steep decline in their support base in Delhi,” Mr Gupta said.

The ruling AAP in Delhi, which has appointed in-charges for all the seven Lok Sabha seats in the city, has stepped up attack on BJP ahead of the general elections.