There was high drama at the office of the CEO (chief election officer), West Bengal when a delegation led by Trinamool Congress general-secretary Abhishek Banerjee arrived on the evening of Monday, 30 March to submit a memorandum.

Banerjee later released videos recorded inside the office which showed a BJP worker, who identified himself on camera as such and gave his name as Sanjay Das, admitting that he was there to submit forms filled by genuine voters left out of the electoral rolls. He also admitted that the bundles of forms (Banerjee claimed the number to have been 30,000) were Form 6, meant to register new voters.

The TMC raised a red flag. Voters left out of the electoral rolls following the SIR (special intensive revision), hearings and adjudication were required to appeal to judicial tribunals set up by Calcutta High Court on the direction of the Supreme Court. Voters left out of the roll, it argued, could therefore not submit Form 6 to register themselves as new voters.

And while the Election Commission of India (ECI) had clarified that there was no bar on ‘new voters’ submitting details in Form 6 for registration, the party wondered how such a large number of ‘new voters’ had emerged in the closing stages of the SIR and why BJP workers were delivering the bundles.

TMC MP Mahua Moitra took to X to claim that the CEO, when asked why he had allowed the forms in bulk to be submitted in his office, told the delegation that he was helpless, that anybody could visit the CEO office. She also claimed that the delegation checked the forms and found that the ‘new voters’ were not even from the state, that the forms were of voters in other states.

A viral video from Gujarat seemed to strengthen the allegation. A man holds up a voter ID card and asks a Gujarat resident (in green shirt, showing the voter card with an Ahmedabad address) if it was true that he would be voting in West Bengal. The man smiles and replies in Gujarati that he had no idea how his name had ended up on the West Bengal rolls.

Also Read: Bengal SIR: ‘Under adjudication’ until it’s too late?

As the slugfest between the ECI and all other parties in the state, barring the BJP and a new unrecognised party formed by Humanyun Kabir — the former........

© National Herald