The Trinamool Congress MPs kept up the pressure on the Election Commission on Saturday, a day after the stormy meeting with the poll panel over the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bengal and elsewhere.
In a media conference at the party office here on Saturday, the Trinamool MPs held up placards of the “suicide note” of Rinku Tarafdar, a booth-level officer (BLO) who was found hanging in Nadia on November 22.
“Nita, the main character of Meghe Dhaka Tara, made by one of Bengal’s greatest filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak, dies from tuberculosis in the arms of her brother. Her last words to him were, ‘Dada, ami bachte chai’ (Elder brother, I want to live.) Rinku’s emotions were the same. She wrote in her suicide note that she was happy with her family. ‘I want to live,’ she wrote, but because of pressure from the EC, I am taking my life,” Jaynagar MP Pratima Mondal told The Telegraph.
Trinamool Rajya Sabha leader Derek O’Brien said: “Yesterday the EC told us, why are you worried? Wait till December 9. After that, you get two months to rectify the list. I said this yesterday, I’ll say this again... How heartless can you be?... These are the suicide notes from the BLOs.... Who is applying the pressure? It’s the EC.”
The poll panel has not made a statement on BLO deaths, leaving its offices at the state and district levels to deal with the issue that the EC is well aware of.
Subdivisional magistrates, under whose watch inquests of suicides take place, usually also hold charge as electoral registration officers who have to process the enumeration forms filed by BLOs. A BLO death necessitates the appointment of a replacement, which the EC is informed about.
O’Brien claimed that at least four BLOs had died by suicide in Bengal alone. One BLO death each in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat and Rajasthan has been reported as a suicide, prompting some BLOs to stop work in protest in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Trinamool MPs O’Brien, Mondal, Sajda Ahmed and Saket Gokhale also held up placards of the five questions that they claimed the EC did not reply to.
An EC spokesperson had on Friday said that the poll panel had told the Trinamool MPs “not to influence or threaten the BLOs”.
“If you are accusing a full delegation of the All-India Trinamool Congress... of cooking up stories, then release it.... If the EC truly has nothing to hide and believes in transparency, then release the transcript (of the meeting),” O’Brien said.
He said a discussion around the EC should be held in the upcoming Parliament session. “BJP will disrupt Parliament... We, as an Opposition party, want Parliament to run because we want the government to be accountable to the people.”