TMC open to work with Congress for impeachment of EC chief Gyanesh Kumar, says Mamata Banerjee

New Delhi: The Trinamool Congress is open to working with the Congress and other opposition parties in Parliament to make a move to impeach Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, West Bengal chief minister and the supremo of the ruling party in the state, Mamata Banerjee, said in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Mamata continued her tirade against the Election Commission over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in West Bengal and presented before the media persons in New Delhi some of the ‘victims’ of the process. They included people who had been allegedly declared dead by the poll panel and dropped from the draft list published on December 16 after the enumeration phase of the revision process.

A day after storming out of a meeting with the chief election commissioner as well as the two other election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, at Nirvachan Sadan, the headquarters of the EC in New Delhi, the TMC supremo reiterated her allegation about the poll panel conducting the SIR in West Bengal to ensure an advantage for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the TMC in the forthcoming assembly elections in the state.

“People sitting behind us are all SIR victims. I could have brought here lakhs of people affected by the roll revision exercise,” Mamata said as she and her party’s general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, addressed a press conference in New Delhi. “They (the EC) are not allowing the SIR victims to defend themselves and their rights to vote,” alleged the TMC supremo.

The chief minister accused the CEC of being arrogant during the meeting with the TMC delegation at the Nirvachan Sadan on Monday.

“Whatever we asked, he never replied; he was threatening us,” she alleged, adding: “We expected humbleness, we are very humble, we even took flowers and sweets. We conveyed our regards to them, but the way they behaved with us, we boycotted them.”

The EC sources, however, dismissed the TMC leader’s allegations and claimed that she and other members of her delegation had repeatedly interrupted the CEC when he had started responding after carefully listening and noting down all the concerns expressed by them over the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal.

“We also want him (Kumar) to be impeached,” she said, when a journalist asked whether her party supported Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi's plan to bring a law in the future with retrospective effect to hold the CECs and the ECs accountable. “We don't have numbers (in Parliament), but there is a provision. It would be recorded. If they (Congress) do something like this, we will also discuss with our party MPs. When there is public interest, we work together.”

She, however, ruled out any possibility of an electoral alliance between the TMC and the Congress for the forthcoming assembly elections in the state. “We fight alone in West Bengal, and we will do the same this time around,” said the TMC chief.

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.

“Out of four election-bound states, they're doing the SIR in three states and not in BJP-ruled Assam,” Mamata said during the news conference in New Delhi. “Why is SIR being done on the eve of the election? Is it possible to do it within 2-3 months without any planning?”