The CPM on Tuesday accused the Election Commission of turning the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls into a process to exclude voters and determine the outcome of the 2026 Assembly polls.
"We have been in the grip of the SIR for the past few months. The objective of the EC should have been to cleanse the voters' list and ensure that people could exercise their democratic right to vote in a free and fair manner. However, what we are seeing is that the Election Commission has made the SIR a tool of exclusion and disenfranchisement.
"The partisan and selective manner in which the SIR is being conducted goes to show that the electoral rolls are not being sanitised, but the EC is trying to determine the outcome of the polls with distorted inputs (voters' list)," CPM state secretary Md Salim said.
Although the rollout of the SIR in Bengal and other states had triggered a controversy with political parties opposed to the BJP accusing the EC of "working at the behest of Union home minister Amit Shah", the Bengal CPM's stated stand has been that the cleansing of the voters' list is required.
The CPM had consistently claimed that the electoral roll was populated with dead and bogus voters, which the Trinamool Congress used to rig the polls.
"We wanted the cleansing of the electoral roll as Trinamool had been manipulating the presence of bogus voters to rig polls. In the run-up to the earlier polls, we had submitted the names of dead and bogus voters, but the EC did not act. We hoped the cleansing would be done this time," said a senior CPM leader.
The CPM leader, however, said that the EC had changed its role and charged the poll panel with "acting as an agent of the RSS-BJP and the Narendra Modi government".
Almost echoing his party colleague, Salim said when the BJP and the RSS failed to achieve their political goal of using SIR on communal lines, "they are now seeking to use administrative measures to exclude people...as the BJP's narrative of Rohinyas and infiltrators populating voters' list bombed".
"The publication of the draft electoral roll showed that the RSS-BJP's wish to cleanse the voters' list on communal lines did not work. Now, they want to achieve the target through administrative means. The entire hearing process, including the abnormally high count of voters tagged with logical discrepancies, shows that the EC and CEO are targeting a particular section of the populace, most of whom are economically weak, vulnerable, women, Matuas and Muslims," Salim said and added the poll panel should spell out the criterion based on which voters were being called for hearing.
Reeling out figures to explain the "suspicious pattern of the EC's SIR", Salim said that the CPM was undertaking a scrutiny to point out the arbitrariness of the SIR process.
"Take the case of booth no. 52 in Malda's Harischandrapur, where 540 voters have been called for the hearing. Similarly, in booth no. 53, notices to appear for hearing have been sent to 530 voters...This, when a booth has around 1,000 voters on average," said Salim as he went on listing such "discrepancies on flimsy grounds" and asked whether "the EC was working on a process that reflected the RSS agenda of exclusion when it should have been one of inclusion."
While stating that the CPM would submit a deputation to the EC and also protest on the streets, Salim asked the poll panel to display transparency and inform the people on whose complaint — the BJP, Trinamool, or any individual — they were being called for a hearing.
Sources in the EC, however, said that the present hearings were being held based on data collected through enumeration forms during the SIR.