‘Blood on your hands’: TMC MPs meet CEC, flag SIR-linked deaths

A 10-member Trinamool Congress (TMC) delegation led by Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien on Thursday met Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar and alleged that 40 SIR-related deaths had occurred in West Bengal so far. Besides, a school teacher working as a booth-level officer in Gujarat’s Mehsana district died of a heart attack during the early hours of Friday.

Accusing the poll panel chief of having “blood on his hands”, the delegation handed over to him the list of the 40 “casualties”. The Trinamool leaders claimed that among those dead were 18 booth-level officers (BLOs) who were conducting the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bengal.

The delegation also comprised Lok Sabha MPs Mahua Moitra, Satabdi Roy, Kalyan Banerjee, Pratima Mondal and Sajda Ahmed, and Rajya Sabha MPs Dola Sen, Mamata Thakur, Saket Gokhale and Prakash Chik Barik.

The leaders posed five questions to the CEC, asking if infiltration was the real issue, why north-eastern states such as Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur, which bordered Bangladesh and Myanmar, were left out of the exercise.

Sources in the Election Commission (EC) said the allegations levelled by the delegation were “baseless”. They said the Trinamool leaders were told that the SIR was being conducted as per the Constitution and electoral laws, and that the party should abide it. They were also asked to refrain from “spreading misinformation” related to the SIR, the sources said.

The Trinamool asked the EC why the SIR was not being conducted in Assam and instead, an “eyewash exercise called special revision was chosen”. “Why is only West Bengal being singled out? Is the SIR meant to protect the voter list or to quietly push Bengalis out of it,” the delegation asked. The leaders sought to know from the CEC if the existing electoral rolls were good enough to elect the country’s Lok Sabha just last year and three major Assembly elections took place based on these, how did the rolls suddenly become “unreliable”?

“And if the rolls are really unreliable, why shouldn’t the Lok Sabha be dissolved immediately?” Moitra said while addressing mediapersons outside the EC office after a two-hour long meeting with the CEC.

The delegation also raised the issue of several BLOs across several states “dying while carrying out their SIR duties”. “In several cases, BLOs have been forced to commit suicide due to the EC’s inhuman pressure. In other cases, families have revealed that the BLOs were forced to work under inhuman conditions, which resulted in health failures and finally their untimely deaths. Who will take responsibility for these lives lost? The EC or the CEC? Is the blood of these avoidable deaths not on the CEC’s hands?” the delegation said.