Samik Bhattacharya
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: After the ruling Trinamool Congress, its principal challenger, Bharatiya Janata Party, too, has now objected to the way the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in West Bengal is continuing, even as the party’s heavyweight in the state, Suvendu Adhikari, had recently commended the Election Commission for the exercise.
Samik Bhattacharya, the state BJP president, on Tuesday alleged that the Electoral Registration Officers and the Assistant Electoral Registration Officers had refused to accept objections submitted by his party’s workers against deletion or inclusion of voters in the electoral rolls through the Form 7s prescribed by the EC for the purpose.
He said that the BJP would not allow the election to take place in West Bengal if the EC did not pay heed to its demand for making the SIR smooth.
Bhattacharya complained about the SIR process just days after his party colleague, Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly, in a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, commended the EC for its impartial and systematic approach to the SIR, stating that the exercise was aimed at cleansing the voter lists of “discrepancies, duplicates, and ineligible entries”, issues that had long plagued West Bengal’s electoral integrity.
The BJP state unit in West Bengal earlier in the day took to X to allege that the ERO and the AERO in Malda had refused to accept 1500 objections duly submitted by six residents of English Bazar in the district on Form 7s, thus “blocking a lawful democratic process”.
“The ERO deflected responsibility, claiming he was not the competent authority and directing them to the AERO (Block Development Officer). The AERO, in turn, refused to accept the forms, citing a lack of ‘instructions’ from the District Election Office, and sent the residents back,” the BJP alleged on the social media platform. “Citizens following the law were pushed into a bureaucratic maze, exposing deliberate evasion and coordinated obstruction. This is not governance. This is the systematic throttling of democracy.”
The BJP alleged that the same had happened in Chinsurah in Hooghly, where the ERO refused to accept Form 7s submitted by the local leaders of the saffron party. “This deliberate stalling is nothing but obfuscation – a calculated attempt to shield Mamata Banerjee’s ghuspetiya (infiltrators) vote bank by blocking lawful objections,” the BJP alleged, adding: “When officials choose political convenience over constitutional duty, it exposes how deep the rot has set in.”
The saffron party has been accusing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s government, and the ruling TMC led by her, of facilitating illegal migration from Bangladesh to India, of helping the infiltrators settle in West Bengal, and of turning them into a vote-bank.
The BJP’s complaint over the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal came on a day the TMC accused its principal challenger of conspiring for mass disenfranchisement of people in the state, citing the recovery of thousands of duly filled Form 7s from a car owned by a local worker of the saffron party in Bankura.
The TMC has been accusing the EC of trying to ensure an edge for the BJP in the coming assembly elections in the state through the SIR of the electoral rolls.
The chief minister and the TMC supremo already alleged that the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal had been marred by “serious irregularities, procedural violations, and administrative lapses”.