West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said she would “expose the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Election Commission (EC) conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters”, as she launched a dharna outside Kolkata’s Esplanade Metro station to protest the alleged arbitrary deletion of several million people during the ongoing Special Intensive Review (SIR) of electoral rolls.
“I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to deprive Bangladeshi voters of their right to vote,” she said in her speech.
“I will bring these voters, who were declared dead by the EC, to this protest site.”
During the dharna, Trinamool Congress (TMC) national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee urged voters to “boycott” the BJP in the upcoming state Assembly elections.
“Boycott the BJP. You may have reasons to not like the TMC, but Bengalis with a minimum sense of honor should not vote for the BJP unless they do not want something bad to happen to Bengal. I had earlier predicted that the BJP would not get more than 50 (out of 294) seats. After what happened in the name of SIR, their number should not exceed 40 seats,” he said.
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“In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls we said ‘no vote for BJP’. Now we say ‘boycott BJP’. Boycott them socially,” he added.
On February 28, the EC published the first part of the final electoral list for West Bengal, dropping 6.18 million names and keeping 70.46 million voters in the list after the SIR.
Certainly another six million people fell into the controversial “inconsistency” category, and their final status is currently being adjudicated by some 500 current and former judicial officers.
The BJP hit back at Banerjee over the sit-in, saying she was organizing such a demonstration to protect infiltrators.
“Banerjee is only interested in saving infiltrators belonging to the Muslim community, which constitutes the bulk of her vote bank. She should be ashamed that she is staging a protest sit-in to save infiltrators, with whose help she was able to win the previous elections. But not anymore,” Union Minister and BJP leader Giriraj Singh said.
(With inputs from PTI)
