The Bengal Assembly election will be fought next year but the battle has already begun on the electoral rolls.

The BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, leader of the Opposition in the Bengal Assembly, on Saturday accused Nadia’s Santipur block development officer (BDO) of overstepping jurisdiction by calling an all-party meeting on March 5 on “Special Summary Revision of Electoral Roll.”

The agenda of the meeting cited in the memo includes providing a list of booth-level agents of all the political parties who plan to contest the Assembly polls, identify dead voters and those voters who have moved to other areas.

“The BDO has called this all-party meeting on his own only to score some brownie points and impress his political boss Mamata Banerjee,” Adhikari said.

Adhikari’s complaint came the same day when Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim made rounds in his constituency scrutinising voters' names. A similar exercise was carried out by North Bengal Development minister Udayan Guha in Cooch Behar’s Dinhata.

Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim personally carries out the voter list verification drive in the Chetla area of south Kolkata. (Videograb)

“The BDO, who is also the assistant electoral registration officer of the Santipur and Ranaghat Assembly constituencies, has clearly overstepped his authority as no such order or instructions were issued by the chief electoral officer [CEO] West Bengal or the Election Commission of India [ECI]. The final voter list has already been published on January 5 and any such revision has to be an exception, which can only be carried out after specific instructions have been issued by the CEO West Bengal or the ECI, which is just not the case here.”

The Bengal BJP Election Commission Coordinator Shishir Bajoria filed a complaint with the chief election commissioner’s office later on Saturday.

Sourced by the correspondent

He sounded a note of caution for the state bureaucrats.

“Unlike the panchayat elections where the so-called election process is ‘managed’ by the state election commission, the Assembly election process is monitored and conducted by the competent and impartial authorities of the ECI,” Adhikari said.

Former Rajya Sabha MP and retired bureaucrat Jawhar Sircar, who had served as the CEO of Bengal, said the BDO will have to justify calling the meeting.

Jawhar Sircar (Facebook/sircar.j)

“He cannot go on a fishing expedition,” Sircar told The Telegraph Online. “If he has received enough complaints [on the electoral rolls] he can call a meeting. He will have to explain to the EC and the CEO why he had called the meeting.”

The battle over the “ghost voters” erupted in Bengal since Thursday afternoon when Mamata Banerjee accused the BJP in the Centre of manipulating electoral rolls by packing it with names of residents from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana with the “blessings of the Election Commission”.

Addressing party workers during a poll-bugle-call meeting, she had cited the names of several people from two constituencies of Gangarampur in South Dinajpur and Raninagar in Murshidabad.

She had also questioned the appointment of the chief election commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, labelling him as Union home minister Amit Shah’s man.

She had said that democracy would remain under threat if the ECI does not act impartially.

CPM state secretary Mohammad Salim said both the ruling parties in the Centre and the state – the BJP and the Trinamul, respectively – were trying to use the electoral rolls for polarisation.

Mohammad Salim (PTI)

“BJP is talking on religious lines, while Trinamul is trying to divide on linguistic lines labelling the Hindi-speaking voters as outsiders. For the last 10 years we have been demanding the voters’ list be sanitised but the state government did not pay any heed,” Salim said.

“We have submitted names of hundreds of dead voters but these names have not been deleted.”

He said only the ruling party in a state could manipulate the voters’ list as it had control over the state machinery.

“The state government has control over the poll personnel and can easily get them to manage it. By suddenly raising this issue, the BJP and the Trinamul are trying to exert control over the poll panel,” Salim said.

On Friday, Adhikari had lodged a complaint against Mamata with the ECI. Later in the day Adhikari along with Bajoria and some party MLAs had met the CEO of Bengal.

“The Bengal BJP had earlier submitted information of 16 lakh voters in a 15,000-page document. How does a Bangladeshi citizen get a voters’ card in Bengal? The EC has deleted 8 lakh of those false voters,” Adhikari had said on Friday following his meeting with the Bengal CEO .

The Bengal chief electoral officer’s office too had denied the chief minister’s allegations via a post on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter).

“As per RP Act 1950 (Representation of People), Registration of Electors Rules 1960 and Manual on Electoral Rolls AEROs, EROs, DEOs and CEOs in any State/UT work for the updation of Electoral Rolls This is done with active participation of Booth Level Agents appointed by political parties,” the post read.

Adhikari had also alleged that Bengal chief secretary Manoj Pant had held a meeting on February 23 at the state secretariat in Howrah with the district magistrates on the electoral rolls.