Kolkata: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, on Friday, launched a sit-in protest here against alleged arbitrary deletions from the post-SIR electoral rolls, sharply escalating her All India Trinamool Congress’s confrontation with the Election Commission of India ahead of the state assembly elections.
Kicking off the dharna by directly accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ECI of working together, Banerjee emphatically declared: “I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters.”
She highlighted cases where living voters had been wrongly listed as deceased in the revised rolls. “I will present those voters, who have been declared dead by the Election Commission, at this protest site,” Banerjee added, underscoring her resolve to challenge the process publicly.
The protest comes just two days prior a planned visit by the ECI’s full bench to West Bengal. This t
iming adds to the growing friction over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists, which began in November last year. TMC leaders, including national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, have labelled the SIR as ‘politically motivated’. Abhishek had announced the dharna earlier this week, warning that it could strip lakhs of legitimate voters of their rights right before the polls.
Official figures released on February 28 show significant changes in the voter base. Around 63.66 lakh names — roughly 8.3 per cent of the total electorate — were removed during the SIR. This brought the number of registered voters down from about 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore. This besides, over 60.06 lakh electors now fall under the “under adjudication” category, where their names await legal verification in the weeks ahead.
TMC claims these deletions have hit minority communities, migrant workers, and economically weaker groups the hardest. Abhishek Banerjee earlier alleged the exercise aimed at wiping out over one crore voters in total. During the sit-in, Banerjee promised to spell out TMC’s next steps against what her party sees as a deliberate bid to tilt the electoral field.
The ECI has maintained that the SIR is a routine exercise carried out to clean up outdated entries and ensure accurate rolls.