Mamata Banerjee takes TMC’s fight over SIR to Delhi, storms out of EC meeting

New Delhi: West Bengal chief minister and the Trinamool Congress supremo, Mamata Banerjee, on Monday called the Election Commission “very arrogant”, as she led some of the ‘victims’ of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the state into a meeting with the poll panel, but stormed out of it, alleging humiliation.

Mamata entered the Nirvachan Sadan donning a black shawl as a mark of protest against the “arbitrary, opaque, and coercive” process of revising the electoral rolls. So did others in her entourage, including some people, whom the EC allegedly declared ‘dead’ and dropped from the rolls while publishing the draft voters’ list on December 16 at the end of the enumeration phase of the revision. The family members of some of the people who allegedly died due to the anxiety caused by the SIR in West Bengal were also in her entourage. The TMC general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, too, accompanied her, wearing a black sweater.

The TMC supremo and her party’s members in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, earlier in the day, confronted the Delhi Police personnel deployed in front of the West Bengal government’s guest houses, where the ‘victims’ of the electoral roll revision had been staying after travelling to the national capital from different parts of the state. In view of the “aggressive deployment” of the Delhi Police personnel around the guest houses, a 22-member team of West Bengal police will arrive in the national capital late on Monday to “ensure the security of the chief minister”.

After leaving the meeting with the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and the Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, in a huff, Mamata accused the commission of trying to use the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal to ensure an advantage for the Bharatiya Janata Party over her TMC in the forthcoming state assembly elections.

Sources in New Delhi, however, said that the CEC and the two other Election Commissioners had given the TMC leaders a patient hearing and had noted down their concerns. But when the CEC started to respond, the TMC leaders repeatedly interrupted him and finally left in a huff.

“So many people have died (due to the SIR of the electoral rolls). Who is responsible? The EC is responsible. They (the EC) are working at the behest of the BJP,” she alleged, while addressing media persons in front of the Nirvachan Sadan. “We told them that we would fight them on the ground. You have the power of the BJP; we have the power of the people. We boycotted the meeting and came out. They have insulted us, humiliated us,” she said, and added, “I have not seen this type of Election Commission in my long career; they are very arrogant.”

The EC struck off over 58 lakh voters and cut down the size of the electorate from 7.66 crore at the beginning of the year to 7.08 crore in the draft list published after the first phase of the revision on December 16. In the second phase, which started on December 27, 1.67 crore voters under scrutiny are being summoned for hearings, including the ones flagged for “logical discrepancies” and 31 lakh whose current electoral roll details did not match or link to the records from the 2002 voter list. A large number of people, including the differently abled, senior and ailing citizens, had to stand in the queues across the state to defend their right to vote. The Supreme Court recently noted that the draft electoral roll of West Bengal had at least 1.25 crore cases of logical discrepancies. The apex court ordered the EC to publish the lists of the voters flagged for logical discrepancies.

The TMC on Monday urged the EC to immediately withdraw all the “logical discrepancy” notices to verified electors, abandon the practice of summoning voters for minor errors, and resolve such cases through desk-level verification. Mamata’s party also asked for an immediate end to interference by the micro-observers, restoring the authority of the Electoral Registration Officers, for disengaging non-statutory backend controllers, and halting this coercive exercise to prevent disenfranchisement and further human cost.

“He talks with an attitude like he is a zamindar, and we are his servants,” Mamata said after meeting the EC, albeit avoiding specifying whom in the EC she was complaining about. “They behaved very badly with us, I said I am sorry we came here for justice; we did not get that, and you are lying. He is a great liar,” she said