Bengal Chief Minister Mamata will hit the streets on Tuesday to register her protest against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which will commence on the same day. This, amid strong warnings to the Booth Level Officers coming from both the Trinamool Congress and the BJP leadership against deletion of genuine names and leaving the fake voters in the voters’ lists.
The TMC protest rally led by Banerjee and her nephew and party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee will start from the Ambedkar statue at Red Road to Jorasanko in North Kolkata.
“Having failed to defeat the TMC legally, they (BJP) have chosen the backdoor by implementing SIR, which we call Silent Invisible Rigging … by deleting the names of the genuine voters and introducing fake names … a technique that they have been using to win elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and other States … but the TMC will not leave an inch and will ensure that not a single name gets deleted,” Abhishek Banerjee said.
The protest rally is seen as an attempt to keep the pressure on the ECI. “Let the SIR be conducted in Bengal, and we will ensure that even after the SIR, we don’t only win but get at least one seat more than what we got in 2021, and the BJP comes down to less than 50 seats.
Banerjee’s earlier threatened to gherao the Election Commission of India office “even if a single name is deleted from the electoral rolls,” adding SIR was the National Register of Citizens (NRC) through the backdoor. “We had stopped NRC in Bengal and will stop SIR from being misused too,” he said.
