Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday, March 6, began a sit-in here to protest against the alleged arbitrary deletions from the post-SIR electoral rolls, escalating the Trinamool Congress’s confrontation with the Election Commission ahead of the state assembly polls.
Launching the dharna at Kolkata’s Esplanade Metro Channel, Banerjee accused the BJP and the Election Commission of conspiring to “disenfranchise Bengali voters” and vowed to expose them.
“I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters,” the TMC supremo said at the start of the protest.
She also alleged that several voters had been wrongly marked as deceased in the revised electoral rolls.
“I will present those voters, who have been declared dead by the Election Commission, at this protest site,” Banerjee said.
The sit-in, which started from 2.15 pm in central Kolkata, was announced earlier by TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, who had accused the poll panel of carrying out a “politically motivated” exercise that could disenfranchise lakhs of legitimate voters.
The protest marks a sharp political escalation by the ruling party, days after the Election Commission published the post-SIR electoral rolls, which have significantly altered the contours of the state’s electorate.
According to official data released on February 28, as many as 63.66 lakh names — around 8.3 per cent of the electorate — have been deleted since the SIR process began in November last year, reducing the voter base from about 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore.
In addition, over 60.06 lakh electors have been placed under the “under adjudication” category, meaning their eligibility will be determined through legal scrutiny in the coming weeks, a process that could further reshape constituency-level electoral equations.
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