Kolkata, Feb 2 Trinamool Congress General Secretary and the party’s Lok Sabha member, Abhishek Banerjee, will be accompanying West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during the latter’s scheduled meeting with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, at the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s headquarters in New Delhi on Monday afternoon.
The meeting time has been scheduled for 4 p.m. The Chief Minister has been in New Delhi since Sunday afternoon, preparing the groundwork for her probable points of objections to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal.
The meeting is taking place amid unprecedented tension between the West Bengal government and the ECI, with the Chief Minister herself filing a petition in the Supreme Court against the ECI and the Office of the state's Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) over the ongoing SIR exercise.
In the petition, Mamata Banerjee had accused the ECI of political bias and adopting an authoritarian approach while conducting the SIR and claimed that the constitutional institution from which impartiality and the protection of democratic values were expected has now "reached a level that is extremely worrying for any democratic society".
This is the second petition filed on this issue. Earlier, Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha member Mahua Moitra and the party's Rajya Sabha members Derek O'Brien and Dola Sen filed a petition in the matter on behalf of the ruling party in the apex court.
Earlier on Saturday, the Chief Minister had sent a letter to the CEC, where she questioned the authority of special roll observers (SROs) and micro-observers, who, according to her, have been appointed only in West Bengal to review the ongoing SIR in the state.
Another significant factor in the development is that the scheduled meeting between the Chief Minister and the CEC is happening on Monday, a day before the apex court will hear (on Tuesday) the crucial matter on the controversies over the Enforcement Directorate (ED)’s parallel raid and search operations at the premises linked to Indian Political Action Committee and I-PAC’s co-founder, Pratik Jain last month.
The apex court, on Tuesday, will hear ED’s petition accusing the Chief Minister, accompanied by top bureaucrats and police officers of the state, of preventing its officials from performing their duties.
Political observers feel that the scheduled meeting between the Chief Minister and the CEC is expected to be quite stormy amid so many developments.
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