BJP alleges 'sponsored' fire in slum to protect illegal voters; TMC, Congress dismiss charge

Kolkata: The BJP on Thursday alleged that the massive fire at Ghuni slum in New Town near Kolkata was "sponsored" to protect illegal voters amid the SIR of electoral rolls, a charge rejected by the ruling TMC and opposition Congress.

BJP leader and West Bengal co-in-charge Amit Malviya claimed that data from the ASD (Absent, Shifted, Dead) list of six booths under Ghuni village raised serious questions about the blaze that broke out on Wednesday evening.

"If there was ever any doubt that the massive fire in the Ghuni slum near Eco Park, New Town was sponsored, one only needs to look at the ASD list of the six booths under Ghuni village," Malviya said in a post on Thursday, asserting that around 850 individuals featured on the list, of whom nearly 650 were Muslims, and that about 450 Muslim individuals, mostly young voters, were marked "untraceable".

He alleged that the SIR exercise was exposing an "illegal vote bank" and claimed the state's ruling dispensation was "rattled" by the clean-up of electoral rolls.

"However, there is no turning back from a constitutional exercise," Malviya said, adding that West Bengal "deserves a chief minister who owes allegiance to its people, not to illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators." A day earlier, soon after the fire broke out, Malviya had alleged that the blaze was linked to the SIR process.

He claimed that "days before the Election Commission of India is set to begin hearings on notices to be served to illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya settlers, a massive fire has broken out in the Ghuni slum", and alleged that visuals of abandoned huts had surfaced since the SIR began.

Malviya alleged that it was an "open secret" that people from Bangladesh had settled in the area, that many residents had allegedly locked their homes and left, and that despite the scale of the blaze, fire tenders were not deployed with urgency.

He further claimed that after the draft voter rolls were published and "thousands of names were struck off", the fire was allegedly orchestrated so that residents could later claim loss of documents such as Aadhaar, ration cards and voter IDs, paving the way for fresh documentation and re-inclusion in voter lists.

Calling it "deliberate manipulation", he said, "Mamata Banerjee is playing with fire. This time, quite literally." The TMC dismissed the allegations as baseless and politically motivated.

TMC state vice-president Jaiprakash Majumdar said the EC's SIR draft electoral rolls had already punctured what he described as the BJP's "lies that West Bengal hosts one crore Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators".

"The Election Commission itself has exposed the lies of the BJP," Majumdar said, citing EC figures which show around 1.83 lakh voters were categorised as 'fake' or 'ghost' in the draft rolls, far short of the numbers repeatedly projected by BJP leaders.

"Now as their lies stand exposed, they are making new stories to justify their claim," said Majumdar, who had joined the TMC in 2022 after quitting the BJP.

Senior Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury also slammed the BJP, accusing it of pushing a "fake narrative".

"The EC data says that what BJP leaders were saying was a white lie. Now they are circulating new theories to justify their claim," said Chowdhury, a former state Congress president.

Officials said a fire broke out at a cluster of shanties near Eco Park in the New Town area on Wednesday evening, with no reports of casualties.

The blaze started in one of the shanties around 7.30 pm and quickly spread to adjoining houses. Around 20 fire tenders were pressed into service to douse the flames.