Kolkata, November 21 (IANS). Leader of the Opposition (LOP) in the West Bengal Assembly and senior BJP leader, Suvendu Adhikari has written a letter to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Thursday.
Suvendu Adhikari’s letter comes after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s letter to CEC Gyanesh Kumar, in which the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) ongoing in the state was demanded to be immediately stopped.
In his letter, Suvendu Adhikari rejected the claims of Mamata Banerjee’s letter to the CEC, which claimed that the SIR was imposed in West Bengal in an unplanned, haphazard and dangerous manner, causing panic among the common people and overburdening election officials, especially booth-level officers (BLOs).
In his letter, Suvendu Adhikari claimed that Mamata Banerjee’s letter to the CEC was a desperate attempt to stop the campaign to clean the voter list through SIR and that the content of her letter was “politically motivated” and “actually bogus”.
He also claimed that the Chief Minister’s move to send a letter to the CEC to stop the SIR process in the state was not to save genuine voters, but a panicked attempt to save bogus voters in the form of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators who managed to get their names included in the voter list.
Earlier on Thursday, Suvendu Adhikari issued a statement alleging that the pressure on BLOs in the state is not due to SIR-related workload, as claimed by Chief Minister Banerjee, but due to undue pressure from District Magistrates and District Electoral Officers on them to resort to unfair practices in connection with the revision exercise.
Suvendu Adhikari alleged that in districts like East Midnapore, Hooghly and East Burdwan, District Magistrates and District Electoral Officers were also acting as full-time election agents of the Trinamool Congress by pressurizing booth-level officials to share their official OTPs either with the District Magistrate or with ruling Trinamool Congress workers appointed as data entry operators.
–IANS
SAK/ABM