The Trinamool Congress on Thursday accused the Election Commission of mismatch in digital and hard copy versions of the 2002 voter data.
At a news meet in Calcutta, state minister Chandrima Bhattacharya and the party’s state general secretary Kunal Ghosh questioned discrepancies by displaying copies of rolls from some Assembly constituencies in Cooch Behar and North 24-Parganas.
“Gross discrepancies have been found in the 2002 voter list uploaded by the Election Commission. This list has repeatedly been referred to during the SIR process as a yardstick. We want to know why there are such glaring differences between the uploaded list and the official hard copy of the 2002 roll,” said Ghosh.
The fresh charge comes amid two suicides and one suicide attempt in Bengal since the SIR’s rollout announcement.
In Cooch Behar, Trinamool leaders alleged hundreds of voter names were missing in the 2002 voter list uploaded on the EC website.
According to them, in booth 303 under the Khapaidanga panchayat, part of the Cooch Behar-II block in 2002, and now under the Cooch Behar North Assembly constituency, uploaded data show 140 voters, whereas the official hard copy of the 2002 list records 721 voters. “Nearly 600 names are missing,” said Girindranath Barman, Trinamool Cooch Behar district chief.
Barman also claimed that in a booth under the Pachaghar panchayat, Mathabhanga
Assembly constituency, the hard copy of the 2002 roll listed 886 voters, but the digital
version showed only 416. “This appears to be a planned exercise under the BJP’s patronage,” Barman alleged.
In North 24-Parganas, Trinamool Ashoknagar MLA Narayan Goswami wrote to the district magistrate, alleging that in the Guma-I panchayat of Habra-II block, the uploaded digital 2002 voter list for booth 159 showed zero voters and in booth 61, names of voters were missing from serial numbers 343 to 414.
BJP leaders dismissed the charges as politically motivated. “Trinamool is trying to politicise the SIR process and create panic. Genuine voters have nothing to fear,” said Biraj Bose, the BJP’s Cooch Behar district vice-president.