Nearly 24 hours after seven court-appointed judicial officers, including three women, were gheraoed and held hostage in Malda, Bengal Police arrested Maulana Shahjahan Ali, the Indian Secular Front’s candidate for the Mothabari Assembly constituency, along with 17 others.
The accused have been remanded to 10 days' police custody.
Security forces rescued the seven judicial officers after protesters gheraoed them for several hours over the deletion of names from electoral rolls in Malda district.
The sparks of protest spread from Mothabari, about 323 kms from Kolkata, to other parts of the state on Thursday. Highways were blocked and traffic movement was stopped.
Protesters from the Malda Assembly constituency blocked National Highway 12 on Thursday morning.
“Those who have been voting for 30 years, 17 years have been removed from the list. In my village the names of at least 200 people are missing. Why did “Vanish” Kumar (Chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar) do this?” asked Asadul Islam, a voter in Malda whose name is missing from the final rolls.
Rabiul Karim, another voter in Malda, asked why the BJP nominees in the district were not speaking against the exclusion of Muslim voters from the electoral rolls.
Rabiul Karim.
Of the 8, 28,127 voters marked under adjudication in the 12 Assembly constituencies of Malda, 1, 34,521 voters are in Sujapur, 79,683 voters are in Mothabari and 68,787 are in Baishnabnagar- all in Kaliachak block.
Sabina Yeasmin, the minister of state for north Bengal development and Trinamool nominee from Sujapur, was present with the protesters.
“The commission is using the same documents to reject a section of the voters and allow others. We want to know the reason behind this double-standard,” the minister said.
Additional district magistrate Sheikh Ansar Ahmed spoke with the protestors and sought time till April 5 to resolve the issue.
The Supreme Court has directed the commission to complete the adjudication process by the last date of nomination for both the phases.
A police driver was injured by stones pelted by protesters in Malda’s Englishbazar. The Cooch Behar-Mathabhanga state highway was blocked for over three hours in the day by voters demanding to know why their names did not figure in the final and supplementary lists.
The national highway 27 was blocked in Jalpaiguri’s Moynaguri. The blockade was lifted after 4 pm. The Maynaguri-Lataguri road and the Maynaguri-Dhupguri stretch of the Asian Highway were obstructed at Churabhandar by the locals.
On April 23, 152 constituencies in the 294-seat Bengal Assembly will go to polls for which the verification of adjudicated voters is underway.
The supplementary list for these 152 seats would have to be completed by April 6. For the remaining 144 seats, the last date for filing of nominations is April 9.
In East Burdwan district, a silent protest march was held at Burdwan town while in North 24-Parganas’ Gaighata, Congress supporters protested the exclusion of members from the Matua community.
Leader of Opposition in the outgoing Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari later addresse a news conference in Kolkata and claimed the gherao of the judicial officers engaged in the SIR exercise in Malda was orchestrated from the "top level of the Trinamool Congress in Kolkata under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee", with local leader Sabina Yasmin executing the plan on the ground.
Adhikari specifically named Yasmin as the "primary architect of implementation" of the alleged plan at the district level.
Earlier in the morning, Banerjee had blamed the Election Commission for "failing to protect" the judicial officers and alleged that Union home minister Amit Shah was orchestrating changes in the state's civil and police administration.
"Everything is Shah's conspiracy, I demand his resignation," she had said.
The incident of Wednesday night came at a time when the fate of over 60lakh voters, marked under adjudication in the final voters list published on February 28, is hanging in the balance.
Till Tuesday evening, the 705 judicial officers involved in the process had disposed of 49, 62, 850 cases while another 11 lakh are still pending.
Since the first supplementary list was released close to midnight March 23, the commission has not clarified how many among those adjudicated have been included in the final rolls.
Since the Election Commission rolled out the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bengal, the state has been on the edge.
On January 15 this year, in Murshidabad’s Farakka, Trinamool lawmaker Manirul Islam led a mob to the block development officer’s office and vandalised the office.
The Trinamool dropped Islam from the list of candidates in the upcoming polls.