West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee
Kolkata: With people across West Bengal continuing to die by suicide allegedly due to the fear of being disenfranchised, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said that she would not fill up the ‘enumeration form’ delivered to her residence for the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the electoral rolls till every citizen of the state would be able to do so.
One of the 80,681 Booth Level Officers (SIR), deployed by the Election Commission for the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal, visited the residence of the state’s chief minister at Kalighat in Kolkata on Wednesday and delivered the enumeration forms for herself and other voters in her family. The chief minister, however, dismissed as “completely false, misleading and deliberate propaganda” the media reports that she, herself, had accepted the enumeration forms from the BLO.
Mamata and her heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee led the ruling Trinamool Congress’s huge rally in Kolkata on Tuesday, protesting the SIR of the electoral rolls, which the ruling party in the state denounced as “silent invisible rigging”.
“The BLO came to our locality to do the job assigned to him, enquired at my residence office about the number of voters in our household and left the forms,” she posted on Facebook on Thursday, adding: “I have not filled up any form. Neither would I as long as everyone in West Bengal would not fill up the form.”
The ruling TMC’s leaders alleged that the anxiety of losing the voting right had led to the death of least 11 persons of West Bengal since the announcement of the SIR of the electoral rolls in the state– mostly by suicide, some purportedly due to anxiety.
Mamata and her party accused the EC of working at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of trying to disenfranchise a large number of genuine citizens of the country living in West Bengal in order to ensure political advantage for the saffron party in the assembly elections in the state next year.