‘Arrest poll panel chief’: Mamata Banerjee demands repoll in Bengal amid EC ‘SIR split’ row | India News
NEW DELHI: Former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday demanded fresh Assembly elections in West Bengal using the pre-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) voter list while announcing pan-India protests against chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, after a report claimed two Election Commissioners had raised objections to aspects of the voter-roll revision exercise.Reacting to a media report, Mamata demanded Kumar’s arrest and accused the Election Commission of working in favour of the BJP.“Re-election must be held in West Bengal with the old voter list,” Banerjee said during a Facebook Live, adding that there would be “pan-India protests till Gyanesh Kumar remains CEC”. “It has now been proven that the BJP and the EC looted the West Bengal assembly polls,” she alleged.Mamata also called for Kumar to be arrested, saying, “He must be immediately arrested and put behind bars. The chair of the CEC is not for a person like him.”“This is such a scandalous story. We had never seen this in our lives. This Election Commissioner must be arrested. He has no moral authority to continue,” she said, referring to the report.The TMC leader said INDIA bloc partners had discussed the issue and would meet soon.Meanwhile, in another TMC pushback, national general secretary and MP Abhishek Banerjee separately accused the election commission of deliberately deleting 30 lakh voter names from West Bengal electoral rolls to benefit the BJP. He alleged that similar manipulation had taken place in Haryana and Bihar and demanded the immediate arrest of Kumar.“The allegations we raised earlier have today been echoed by the other Election Commissioners as well. Just as the names of 30 lakh people were deleted from the voter list to benefit one political party, the same was done in Haryana and Bihar,” Abhishek alleged.Abhishek also questioned the process through which Kumar was appointed, citing a split Supreme Court verdict on the Election Commission selection panel and the dismissal of an impeachment motion moved by Opposition parties.The Election Commission, however, said that “operational queries or inputs” had been raised by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi on matters including the SIR exercise, but maintained that these related to the draft stage and were part of “standard administrative practice aimed at safeguarding voter rights”. The poll panel also said decisions relating to the SIR were taken unanimously with the approval of all three Election Commissioners.
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The row erupted when a media report claimed that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected at least 14 times over the past 10 months to decisions and orders concerning the SIR, including some that they allegedly said were taken without their knowledge.
