One million hearings related to the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of voter list were pending in West Bengal, Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal said, stressing that the process was likely to be completed by the February 7 (Saturday) deadline.
SIR was launched in the state on November 4. (PTI)”The total number of voters called for hearing in the state was around 15 million. This includes unmapped voters and logistical anomalies. Around one million hearings were pending till Wednesday alone,” Agarwal said.
Mamata Banerjee, who became the first sitting chief minister to personally argue her own petition before the Supreme Court, called for protecting “democracy” and “people’s lives”, as the court sought a response from the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the recall notice.
In Kolkata, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) said around 6.3 million hearings were pending. It maintained that it was almost impossible to complete the process as the deadline expired in a matter of days.
A second election official said the hearing process is expected to be completed by Saturday.
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SIR was launched in the state on November 4. The draft roll was released on December 16 and nearly 5.8 million voters were marked as absent, transferred, dead or fake. Notices were sent to about 3.2 million voters who could be added to the 2002 voter rolls based on the state’s last SIR. They were sent to another 13.6 million voters whose tally forms showed logical discrepancies.
In a statement, the TMC said 8.8 million hearings have taken place since December 16 at a rate of about 180,000 per day. It added around 6.3 million hearings are pending, requiring an impossible 1.5 million hearings per day. The final voter list is scheduled to be published on February 14 ahead of the assembly elections.
State minister Shashi Panja, who was part of a TMC delegation that met Aggarwal on Wednesday, said 15 million unmapped voters and with logical discrepancies, who are being called for hearing, are re-verifying the documents of another 50 million voters. “What’s the point? They’re being deployed by micro-observers. It can’t go on.”
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The ECI is likely to announce the election date in February and the polls are expected to be held in April. It has separately rejected the West Bengal government’s request to exempt some bureaucrats, including Home Secretary Jagdish Prasad Meena, and the state’s top police officers from election duties as observers in other states where assembly elections are due this year.
