West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday lashed out at the Election Commission, alleging that there were “gross errors” in the draft rolls published following the enumeration phase of the SIR in the state.Addressing a meeting of TMC’s Booth Level Agents (BLAs) at the Netaji Indoor Stadium here, she also dubbed it an exercise “riddled with blunders from A to Z”.
Banerjee alleged that the EC was appointing observers without informing the state government, and working to foster the BJP’s interests.
“The Election Commission is working only as per the directions of the BJP. There are gross errors in mapping of voters during the enumeration phase of the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise in the state,” she claimed.
Alleging that thousands of “legitimate voters” have found their names deleted from the draft rolls, Banerjee said, “We don’t know how the problems of so many genuine electors can be solved in so little time.”
In the draft electoral rolls published after the enumeration phase, 58,20,899 names have been excluded, reducing the electorate to 7.08 crore in West Bengal.
Around 1.36 crore entries have also been flagged for “logical discrepancies”, while 30 lakh voters were categorised as unmapped – a significant percentage of whom are likely to be called for verification hearings over the next 45 days.
The TMC supremo also asserted that central officers who have been appointed micro observers for SIR hearings have little knowledge of the local language, and are “unfit” to conduct the verifications during the second phase of the ongoing revision exercise.