Mostari Banu, the first petitioner against the SIR in Bengal, addressed the media at the CPM office here on Monday to underscore how the electoral roll-revision drive was causing immense suffering to the people of the state.
The development comes in the wake of Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee bringing the SIR battle to the capital last week. Mamata had paraded “victims” from around 90 families who either lost their kin during the SIR exercise or had their names deleted from the draft list.
Banu from Bhagwangola in Murshidabad said: “I filed this case on November 11.... People of Bengal are suffering during the SIR. Even disabled people are made to come for hearings.”
She said CPM leaders had helped her move court. “The EC said that no one whose name is on the 2002 list would be deleted. My name is in it.... Yet I was summoned for hearing on the ground that my parents are only 15 years older than me (according to EC records),” Banu said.
Her lawyer Sabyasachi Chatterjee alleged “en masse deletions in minority areas of Howrah Dakshin Assembly constituency”. “The objector’s name is left as blank or marked X, and the address is merely given as 5/1 West Bengal.... Today, the CJI ordered the EC to follow the rules regarding objections. The objector must also be present during the hearing,” he said.
He said Mamata should have come to the court much earlier. “She is saying from the beginning that this is an NRC-like process, but has come to court only now.... The Bengal government has still not filed an affidavit despite being a respondent.”
Banu’s petition challenges the EC’s attempt to determine citizenship and has demanded that the court strike down the enumeration forms and linking of names to the 2002 rolls.
CPM politburo member Nilotpal Basu underlined the “arbitrary use of artificial intelligence” for the creation of a “so-called list of suspect voters”.
“There is no clarity or transparency on that. It is leading to a lot of harassment. And in Bengal particularly, we are finding a clear bias… The poor, minorities and other vulnerable sections are being forced to face that second phase of hearing.... There is a real threat that a large number of voters will be deleted from the list,” he said.
