CPM state secretary Md Salim said in Calcutta on Thursday that the Election Commission was a constitutional entity that must be transparent and accountable in its actions.
He also questioned the poll panel’s intentions as it had not removed the names of “dead and bogus voters” from Bengal’s electoral rolls, although the CPM had on several occasions submitted documents in support of their claim.
The CPM politburo member brought up the Bengal issue while responding to the Supreme Court’s interim order that on Thursday directed the EC to publish a booth-wise list of Bihar electors not included in the draft electoral roll published on
August 1.
While welcoming the verdict, Salim went on to attack the Election Commission for not taking action in Bengal to cleanse the electoral rolls of the names of allegedly fake voters. The CPM, which had often been at the receiving end for alleged electoral irregularities during its 34-year reign in the state, had, before every election and during the electoral revision process, submitted documents identifying the names of dead and fake voters and seeking their removal.
In 2022, the CPM identified over 34,000 dead and shifted voters in 17 Assembly constituencies and submitted their names to the EC. However, the EC did not always act on the complaints, Salim said.
“There are fake voters in the electoral rolls of several states, including Bengal. We want the deletion of dead and fake voters. In Bengal, we had submitted thousands of such names, but the EC had failed to remove those names. The death of a person is registered. All the EC needs to do is use that recorded data and remove the names of dead voters. But they have not done it. Similarly, there are fake voters. Against one address, large numbers of voters are recorded in Bengal as well as in other states. All these need to be deleted, but the EC must give reasons for the deletions,” Salim said.
CPM leader Rabin Deb, who had the task of taking up electoral roll-related issues with the EC, said the party’s complaints often got stonewalled because the then law put the onus of proving that a person was dead on the complainant.
“The need to provide the death certificate of a dead person made it difficult for political parties to push for the removal of names of those who are not alive. But in 2023, the EC changed the manual and tasked booth-level officers (BLOs) to vet such complaints by getting necessary proof from urban local bodies or panchayats, as would be the case,” Deb said.
This, he felt, was achieved after a “long battle” and would help in cleansing electoral rolls of dead voters.
Almost echoing Deb, the CPM state secretary said that if the Election Commission did not conduct itself with “transparency and accountability”, it would be construed that the “poll panel was working to help the ruling party”.
But what Salim and Deb did not say is whether the CPM has the organisational strength to carry out the exercise of identifying dead, fake and shifted voters in the 80,000-odd booths in the state when the special intensive revision is carried out in Bengal.
The Trinamool Congress had already raised objections to the proposed special intensive revision in Bengal