West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged on Tuesday that the 54 lakh names, which were deleted from the draft rolls during the SIR in the state, were done unilaterally by the Election Commission which “misused” powers of electoral registration officers (EROs) to get the job done.
Upping the ante against the EC amid the ongoing and contentious SIR exercise in the state, Banerjee alleged that a bulk of the deleted voters were “genuine electors”, who were not allowed to defend themselves because they weren’t even apprised of the grounds of deletion.
“The EC, while sitting in Delhi, used AI tools devised by the BJP to delete names. These AI software accounted for the names mismatch in SIR data. They deleted names of women who changed surnames post marriage. They have also ‘killed’ many voters across the state who are still living,” Banerjee alleged, while addressing a press conference at the state secretariat Nabanna.
These EROs were given responsibilities for the 54 lakh name deletions, whereas in many instances, these officers weren’t even aware that the marked names were being removed, she added.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has already written five letters to the Chief Election Commissioner Ganesh Kumar complaining of anomalies, unilateral decisions and digitisation errors in electoral rolls accounting for hardships faced by electors in the state.
Claiming that ‘logical discrepancy’ was not part of the original SIR verification process, and that it was “included as an afterthought to add to deletions”, Banerjee said on Tuesday that the “BJP-EC nexus” was planning to remove another one crore names from the final rolls.
“The commission has earmarked another 1.36 crore voters for verification hearings on grounds of logical discrepancy. Eminent personalities like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, poet Joy Goswami, cricketers Md Shami and Laxmi Ratan Shukla are part of that list. This list was created so that one crore voters could be removed,” the chief minister said.
Mamata Banerjee accused the EC of working hand-in-hand with the BJP in conducting the SIR exercise in a manner that would aid the saffron camp on the ground.
“The EC has not allowed BLA-2s to attend hearings because the BJP couldn’t amass its workers to do the job,” Mamata Banerjee, also the TMC supremo, said.
Challenging the deployment of micro-observers in the state to oversee the ongoing hearing phase of SIR, the Mamata Banerjee accused the Commission of going beyond its own rules to conduct the exercise.
“The use of micro-observers is not allowed as per SIR rules; why are they being deployed only in Bengal and no other state?” she asked.
Banerjee maintained that people are not obliged to listen to micro-observers, who are “acting like BJP stooges”, since they are external to the original SIR rules.
“The BJP, with aid from the Commission, deployed the same anomaly tactics in Maharashtra, Haryana and Bihar to win elections in those states. Only, the opposition parties there couldn’t catch those tricks on time,” she claimed.
Holding up a purported photo of a bunch of forms at the boot of a car, Banerjee alleged that the BJP and its agencies were caught red-handed in various pockets of the state transporting SIR forms in bulk for deletion in Bankura and in Malda districts.
‘Logical discrepancy added to expand deletions’, Mamata Banerjee
Claiming that the term ‘logical discrepancy’ was not part of the original SIR verification process, Banerjee said it was later introduced to justify further deletions.
She alleged that the “BJP-EC nexus” was planning to remove another one crore names from the final electoral rolls.
“The EC has not allowed BLA-2s to attend hearings because the BJP couldn’t amass its workers to do the job,” Banerjee, who is also the Trinamool Congress supremo, said.
BLA-2s, or Booth Level Agents appointed by political parties, play a role in representing voters during verification and hearings.
Earlier on Monday, Banerjee wrote to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for the fifth time since the controversy around the SIR exercise began.
In her letter, she claimed that AI-driven digitisation errors in the 2002 electoral rolls were causing widespread hardship to genuine voters during the revision process.
Procedure ‘fundamentally flawed’, says CM
Banerjee also claimed that no proper acknowledgement was being issued for documents submitted during the SIR process, alleging that the entire procedure was “fundamentally flawed”.
The Election Commission has not yet responded publicly to the allegations made by the chief minister.
According to the news agency, in the letter, Banerjee said serious errors occurred during the digitisation of the 2002 voters’ list using AI tools, resulting in large-scale data mismatches and the wrongful categorisation of genuine voters as having “logical discrepancies”.
She accused the EC of disregarding statutory procedures followed over the past two decades and said voters were being forced to re-establish their identity despite earlier corrections made after “quasi-judicial hearings”.
(With PTI inputs)
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