Kolkata, March 1 Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee on Sunday announced that party supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will sit on a dharna in Kolkata on March 6 to protest against the alleged deletion of names from the final voters’ list in West Bengal following the SIR process.
Addressing a press conference, Banerjee said, “The BJP cannot win the Assembly polls. That is why it is using the Election Commission to influence the election results by deleting genuine voters. BJP leaders gave a target of deleting over one crore voters in Bengal. This was decided even before the SIR process commenced here. To protest against the arbitrary deletion of names, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will sit on a dharna in Kolkata on March 6.”
He said the dharna would be held at Esplanade in central Kolkata, where Mamata Banerjee had staged a 26-day hunger strike in 2008.
“Why isn’t the Election Commission publishing a list of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas who have been identified during the SIR process in Bengal? This is nothing but a lie manufactured by the BJP. Deletion of genuine voters from Bengal’s voters’ list will not yield any result for the BJP, as it will not win more than 50 seats in the Assembly polls,” Banerjee said.
Abhishek Banerjee alleged that the exclusion of a large number of names is against the democratic process. He claimed that the voting rights of common people are being curtailed in the name of revising the voters’ list and questioned the role of the Election Commission in the matter.
“The Election Commission will have to take responsibility for this. So many have died in Bengal due to the SIR process. In the name of logical discrepancies, the Election Commission has only followed the BJP’s diktat, which is to remove over one crore names from the voters’ list,” he said.
According to him, party leaders and workers from across the state will attend the dharna on March 6 to stand by Mamata Banerjee in her protest against the deletion of names.
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