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KOLKATA: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Suvendu Adhikari on Tuesday said the district units of the party have been told to draw up a list of people who have died or shifted out but are still listed as voters ahead of the special intensive revision (SIR) in West Bengal.
Adhikari, who was speaking on the sidelines of a Kali puja in Nandigram on Monday, said his party will ensure that the names of all dead and absentee voters are deleted.
“Not only will the names of dead and fake voters be deleted, we will ensure that infiltrators from Bangladesh don’t find a place in the revised roll. Also, there are thousands of names that exist in voters’ lists at several places. These multiple entries have to be deleted too,” Adhikari said.
The Election Commission has conducted a special intensive revision of the electoral roll in Bihar, which is scheduled to vote on November 6 and 11, and has made it clear that the exercise would be conducted in other states as well. The election watchdog published the final electoral list for Bihar on September 30, which comprised 74.2 million voters, roughly 4.7 million names lighter than at the beginning of the controversial exercise.
The move by BJP comes at a time when the party and the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) have focused on strengthening their organisational base at polling booth level in every district.
There were around 80,000 polling booths in Bengal during the 2021 assembly polls.
Although BJP could win only 77 of Bengal’s 294 seats in 2021, the BJP was ahead of TMC in around 25,000 polling booths.
A Bengal BJP leader said the district units were told to prepare their own lists of dead and absentee voters although the party was yet to select its booth level agents (BLA) for the exercise.
CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said his party estimated that there could be 50-70 dead and absentee voters in every polling booth area of Bengal.
“The number is more in the urban areas. If these are detected, then around five million names could be deleted. The EC should have ordered voters’ list revision in Bengal years ago,” Chakraborty said.
The CPI(M) will meet the state chief electoral officer next week to discuss these issues and demand that names of genuine voters should not be deleted.
State Congress leaders said they, too, are preparing to set up booth-level monitoring committees in regions where the party has presence.
