Thane:
A fake ration card issued in the name of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, enlisting names of her two children as Rahul and Priyanka, was found in Maharashtra's Thane district, a right to information activist said on Wednesday.
The card was issued in August last year by Thane ration authority. The family's annual income in it was shown as Rs 30,000 and it bore Gandhi's New Delhi address, activist Praveen Pandey told IANS.
The card was found in a parking lot of the Ulhasnagar Municipal Corporation (UMC), around 60 km northeast of Mumbai.
"My friend Premchand Jha and I had some work at the UMC on Saturday and while we were parking our vehicle, we found a ration card lying in the parking lot. We thought someone must have lost it. But we were shocked to see that it was issued in the names of Sonia Gandhi and her children Rahul and Priyanka. It even bore the New Delhi address," he said.
Pandey said that with municipal polls round the corner in several parts of the state, such bogus ration cards may be used for illegal voting.
He said their NGO, Ulhasnagar Bachao Abhiyan, had written to the election commission and requested that the ration card be disqualified on the basis of the Delhi address.
"The signature of the issuing authority read as Mr. Kambale, but when we checked at the ration office, there was no officer with that surname. Hence we are convinced that the ration card is most definitely a fake and was made with a purpose to get a voter's identity card," Pandey said.