Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday began sit-in protest against alleged voter roll deletions via Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state, accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party and Election Commission of hatching a “conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters”. She vowed to present all those voters that have been declared dead by the poll body.“I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters,” she said at the start of the protest.“I will present those voters, who have been declared dead by the Election Commission, at this protest site,” she added.Official figures released on February 28 show that nearly 63.66 lakh names — about 8.3% of the electorate — have been removed since the SIR exercise started in November last year, bringing the total number of voters down from roughly 7.66 crore to a little over 7.04 crore. Additionally, more than 60.06 lakh electors have been classified as “under adjudication”, indicating that their eligibility will be assessed through legal review in the coming weeks, a process that could further alter constituency-level electoral dynamics.The sit-in protest, which began at in central Kolkata on Friday afternoon, had been announced earlier by TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, who alleged that the poll panel was conducting a “politically motivated” exercise that could disenfranchise lakhs of genuine voters.BJP’s Amit Malviya slammed the Bengal CM over high unemployment in the state saying that the CM should have been focusing on “delivering what she was elected for, instead of sitting on dharnas”.“There are approximately 85 lakh unemployed people in the 18–40 age group in West Bengal, according to informed sources in the state government. That puts unemployment under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at a staggering 13%, far higher than the national average, which remains in the low single digits. This is entirely to the credit of Mamata Banerjee and the result of the colossal misgovernance that West Bengal has endured over the last 15 years. Had the Chief Minister focused on delivering what she was elected for, instead of sitting on dharnas, things wouldn’t have been this bad. But it is too late now,” he said in a post on X.
