Kolkata, Dec 27 The Election Commission of India (ECI) has summoned two sons of four-time Trinamool Congress MP and currently the party's Chief Whip in Lok Sabha, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, for a hearing on claims and objections to the draft voters' list, which started from Saturday.
Confirming the development, Ghosh alleged that this proves the kind of farce going on in West Bengal in the name of the revision exercise.
She also confirmed that both her sons received the notices for the hearing as their names were not included in the draft voters' list published on December 16.
Ghosh also claimed that besides her two sons, her mother and younger sister were issued notices for being present at the hearing on claims and objections to the draft voters' list. Their names were also not included in the draft voters' list.
"Both my sons are government servants. Their deceased father, Sudarshan Ghosh Dastidar, was a member of the West Bengal cabinet. I have been a Lok Sabha member for four terms since 2009. Still, they have been summoned for a hearing. So what is going on in the name of SIR is easily imaginable. It is nothing but an exercise to harass people," she said.
She also claimed that her party had been claiming since the beginning that such confusions were obvious if a two-year exercise had to be completed within two months.
This is not the first instance of political controversy, when the close relatives of elected representatives of the Trinamool Congress got notices for a hearing on claims and objections.
On Friday, a similar incident surfaced where ECI summoned the mother, brother, and sister-in-law of Trinamool Congress legislator from the Khandaghosh Assembly constituency in East Burdwan district, Nabin Chandra Bag, for a hearing.
Bag had alleged that her mother, brother, and sister-in-law had been served with notices for a hearing by the Commission, despite their names in the 2002 voters' list.
Bag is a three-time legislator from Khandaghosh since 2011. However, from 2011 to 2016, he was a CPI(M) legislator. Before the 2016 West Bengal Assembly elections, he joined Trinamool Congress and subsequently got elected as a ruling party candidate twice -- in 2016 and 2021.
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