SIR row erupts: BJP hits back after Mamata Banerjee’s letter to CEC

NEW DELHI: West Bengal person of the absorption Suvendu Adhikari connected Monday sent a missive to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, dismissing CM Mamata Banerjee's "desperate lies" astir the SIR workout and her latest petition to the Election Commission to halt it. The BJP person said her concerns were "nothing but axenic fiction."Adhikari’s missive to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar came 2 days aft Banerjee wrote expressing interest implicit what she described arsenic “serious irregularities, procedural violations and administrative lapses” during the SIR.In his counter-argument, Adhikari described Banerjee’s allegations arsenic a “desperate effort to sabotage a captious and timely antiauthoritarian exercise.”“The SIR is not, arsenic she falsely portrays, an ‘unplanned, ill-prepared, and advertisement hoc’ farce, but a meticulously orchestrated nationalist inaugural aimed astatine purging the strategy of duplicate, bogus, and ineligible entries that person inflated elector lists and undermined the sanctity of our democracy,” the missive read.

Adhikari further accused her medication of attempting to disrupt the exercise.“It is wide arsenic daylight that the Hon’ble Chief Minister’s outrage stems from the counterfactual reality: the SIR is proving devastatingly counterproductive to her party's prospects successful the upcoming 2026 Assembly Elections, arsenic it lays bare the ‘extras’ – fictitious voters, ghosts of the deceased, and amerciable infiltrators; that her Administration and Party Cadres person systematically shielded and thrived upon,” the missive further read.

The BJP person emphasised that the SIR had been implemented aft “extensive nationwide consultations with broad grooming modules disseminated to implicit 50,000 Booth Level Officers and Electoral Registration Officers successful West Bengal alone.”He rejected the main minister’s allegations of server failures and information mismatches during the SIR exercise.“IT systems, acold from being ‘defective and unreliable,’ person processed millions of entries seamlessly, with real-time dashboards ensuring transparency,” Adhikari further wrote.He besides accused the Trinamool Congress of attempting to disrupt the SIR by intimidating officials, orchestrating protests and spreading disinformation online.“The Hon'ble Chief Minister's litany of grievances is not lone factually inaccurate but a deliberate distortion designed to malign the ECI arsenic ‘politically motivated’ and to manufacture a mendacious communicative of wide discomfort and disenfranchisement.

In truth, it is her ain Administration and Party machinery that person colluded to sabotage the SIR astatine each turn: intimidating tract officials (as successful the lawsuit of Electoral Roll Observer; Shri C Murugan) done mob vandalism, veiled threats and bureaucratic hurdles, flooding societal media with disinformation campaigns, and orchestrating orchestrated protests to make an ambiance of negativity and fear.

These unholy acts question to represent the ECI's lawful diligence arsenic harassment, erstwhile successful reality, the Commission's actions are safeguarding the franchise of genuine voters portion weeding retired the fraudulent.

Such tactics are a shameful battle connected Democratic institutions, and I impulse the ECI to stay vigilant against these machinations,” Adhikari’s missive read.Responding to allegations of excessive verification and procedural gaps, Adhikari wrote that checks for “logical discrepancies” specified arsenic spelling oregon property mismatches are portion of a golden modular verification process.He defended the assignment of neutral observers and the exclusion of booth-level agents from hearings.

Adhikari further stated that these steps were indispensable to forestall partisan interference. Regarding papers deletions and rejections, helium stressed that each removals travel strict owed process nether the Representation of the People Act, 1950, with appeals mechanisms successful place.Adhikari urged the EC to proceed the SIR “undaunted, fortified by the unwavering enactment of the antiauthoritarian masses.” He further described the workout arsenic “not an battle connected the Constitution but its truest vindication, purging the shadows that person eclipsed our polls for excessively long.”

What Mamata Banerjee wrote

Banerjee, successful her missive to the Chief Election Commissioner, warned that if the SIR was allowed to proceed successful its contiguous form, it would effect successful “irreparable damage, large-scale disenfranchisement of eligible voters, and a nonstop battle connected the foundational principles of antiauthoritarian governance.”She called the workout “unplanned, arbitrary and adhoc” and urged the canvass assemblage to halt it if glitches remained unrectified.

The main curate highlighted the strain connected Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and different frontline staff, claiming the process had been “crippled from time one” owed to mediocre training, server failures, disorder implicit mandatory documentation and the adjacent impossibility of gathering voters during their enactment hours.She said BLOs were being forced to enactment “far beyond quality limits” portion managing their superior duties arsenic teachers oregon anganwadi workers, and cautioned that the credibility of elector rolls itself was astatine risk.