The Election Commission on Wednesday transferred 11 district magistrates and the district election officers of north and south Calcutta, continuing with its purge of the top Bengal bureaucracy.

Sources said that during its review of the state administration’s poll preparedness between March 8 and 10, the EC concluded that these officials had failed to take steps to ensure free and fair elections.

“In one fell swoop, the DMs of nearly half of the districts have been changed. Before this, the EC had transferred the chief secretary and the home secretary. Such a massive rejig of the state’s civil administration is unprecedented during an election. The stern steps have been taken to hold free and fair polls this year,” said a senior
bureaucrat.

The police administration has also been shaken up with the shunting of 33 top-ranking officers in the past two days, including the director-general of police and the Kolkata Police commissioner.

The removal of district magistrates, who also work as district election officers (DEOs), is particularly significant as they play the most important role in ensuring fair elections. They are also the highest authority in a district to conduct the polls on behalf of the EC.

This major rejig comes within a few days of the EC transferring the chief secretary and the home secretary within hours of the poll dates being declared on
Sunday.

In a letter to the chief secretary of Bengal, the EC sent the names of 11 IAS officers and asked him to appoint them as DM-cum-DEOs by Thursday afternoon in place of the existing DMs.

The districts whose magistrates have been changed are Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, North Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia, East Burdwan, North 24-Parganas, South 24-Parganas, Darjeeling and Alipurduar.

In addition to the DMs, the EC also replaced Kolkata Municipal Corporation commissioner Anshul Gupta with Smita Pandey, a 2005-batch IAS officer. The KMC commissioner is the DEO for northCalcutta.

Sources said the EC had appointed as DEOs officers who were known to be upright and not those in the “good books of the ruling dispensation of Bengal”.

“For example, the EC has appointed Smita Pandey and Randhir Kumar as the DEOs of north and south Calcutta, respectively. These two officers had been appointed as district electoral roll observers at the beginning of the SIR drive. Weeks later, the state government shifted them to less important roles. The EC had asked the state government to revoke their transfer orders, but the state has not accepted it so far,” a bureaucrat said.

He also said that the majority of the officers who the EC sent to the districts as DEOs on Wednesday were either never appointed as DMs or appointed for a brief period by the state government. “They are considered to be deprived ones,” he added.

Sources in the poll panel said the majority of the DMs transferred on Wednesday had earlier been cautioned by the poll panel over their performance related to the conduct of the SIR.

“At least six to seven DMs were cautioned by the poll panel during a videoconference a few weeks ago after it was found that they didn’t work towards making the SIR successful,” said a source in the poll panel.

“Some of these DMs were pulled up for uploading suspicious documents after voter hearings. They were also cautioned for delaying the process of uploading documents. The EC felt that these DMs were not impartial. This is the reason why they were transferred — to ensure fair elections,” the source said.

The DMs of Murshidabad and Alipurduar had been appointed only recently. The EC, the source said, felt that they were hurriedly brought in by the state government as part of a plan.

Two Bengal-cadre officers — P. Mohan Gandhi, the MD of the Minor Mineral Development Corporation, and Parvez Ahmad Siddiqui, the food and supplies secretary — have been sent to other states as observers without prior approval from the Bengal government, Nabanna sourcessaid.

Trinamool spokesperson Arup Chakraborty alleged that the BJP was using the EC to transfer officers as the party knew it would not be able to win the Bengal elections democratically.

“Transferring officers cannot help them win elections. After the election results on May 4, they will suddenly discover that the BJP has been transferred out of Bengal forever,” Chakraborty said.

Debjit Sarkar, the chief spokesperson for the Bengal BJP, said: “In the past one-and-a-half decades in the state, there has been no difference between the TMC and the administration. Those who cannot sit in TMC offices have parallel arrangements to work for the party within the administration. The EC had no option but to transfer officers playing a partisanrole.”

The CPM said transferring officers en masse would not help in holding free and fair polls.

“Whenever elections come, the commission transfers officers. This time, the new trend is that the commission has been transferring officers in bulk. Though transferring officers does not mean that the election will be free and fair, it was Mamata Banerjee who established that her top officers can be shifted to her political party by sending Rajeev Kumar to the Rajya Sabha,” CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said.