The Trinamool Congress on Friday said the Election Commission of India had failed to answer five questions the party raised about the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bengal.

A 10-member delegation of Bengal’s ruling party led by Rajya Sabha leader Derek O'Brien met the full bench of the Election Commission (EC) in Delhi on Friday against the backdrop of Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee's letter to chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, seeking his "immediate intervention" on two recent concerns.

Mamata had referred to the state chief electoral officer’s direction to district election officers not to engage on-contract data-entry operators and Bangla Sahayata Kendra staff for the SIR or other poll-related work, and a proposal to set up polling booths inside private residential complexes.

The Trinamool has also alleged that several deaths linked to the SIR process have been reported in the state of both voters and booth-level officers (BLOs) conducting the clean-up of voter lists.

“We did not get the answers to any of the five questions that we raised before the EC,” O’Brien said after Friday’s meeting.

One of the questions the Trinamool asked was if the SIR was meant to verify voters or to cast doubt on the very identity of Bengalis.

“If infiltration is the issue, why are states like Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur bordering Bangladesh and Myanmar left out of the process? Even in Assam you failed to institute the SIR, instead choosing an eyewash by the name of ‘special revision’. Only Bengal is being singled out. So we ask again: Was the SIR meant to protect the voter list or to quietly push Bengalis out of it,” the Trinamool asked.

The SIR exercise was rolled out first in Bihar ahead of the state Assembly polls and infiltration was the main poll plank for the ruling JDU-BJP combine. Though the number of “infiltrators” identified after SIR in Bihar was negligible. The final draft roll published in Bihar did not mention any “foreign illegal immigrants.”

The BJP emerged as the single-largest party in Bihar.

Another question the Trinamool asked was why the EC was questioning the same electoral rolls that were good enough to elect the country's Lok Sabha just last year.

The party asked: “Three major Assembly Elections have taken place since. Families stood in long queues believing their democratic rights were protected. How did those rolls suddenly become ‘unreliable’ within a year? And if the rolls really are unreliable then why not dissolve the Lok Sabha that was elected by these ‘unreliable voters’?”

The third question said that across several states in India, “numerous BLOs have lost their lives while carrying out their SIR duties”.

The party said: “In several cases BLOs have been forced to commit suicide citing the inhuman pressure by the ECl, and in other cases families have revealed that the BLOs were forced to work under inhuman conditions that resulted in health failures and finally their untimely deaths. Who will take responsibility for these lives lost? The Election Commission or chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar? We have seen how the BLOs received insufficient training, next to no support, were piled down with unrealistic deadlines and pressured until many of them finally succumbed to illness or death. Is the blood of these avoidable deaths not on the chief electoral commissioners' hands?

While the SIR in Bihar was relatively event free, the exercise that is now underway in 12 states and Union Territories has generated controversy over the deaths.

In BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, a 47-year-old school teacher collapsed and dead inside his school premises on Thursday while he was verifying voters’ data.

The deceased Sarvesh Gangwar’s elder brother, Yogesh, who is also deployed as a BLO in Saharanpur district, has claimed his brother had requested the district authorities to relieve him of the responsibility as a BLO but his appeals were disregarded.

Sarvesh used to reach his school by 5am, go for field duty and work till midnight, per his family. The sequence of events is similar to cases elsewhere in the country.

In its fourth question, the Trinamool said that it has raised questions about the neutrality and efficacy of the SIR process time and time again but the Election Commission “has not taken any concrete steps” to address them.

“Yet, when the BJP raises a frivolous issue, it is taken up with utmost priority. Consider the appointment of external BLAs [booth-level activists of political parties] from other booths or the non-inclusion of date entry operators from Bangla Sahayata Kendras. Does this not reek of bias and partisan practice, which you seek to address, ultimately to the detriment of your constitutional autonomy?

The fifth question was on the model code of conduct.

“In Bihar, we saw how suddenly the model code of conduct became malleable with new restrictions on public mobilisation, spending and new provisions of digital complaints all geared to aid the BJP,” the Trinamool alleged.

“In Bengal BJP leaders are claiming that around 1 crore voters' names will be deleted from the rolls. The ECI has taken no cognisance of these comments, nor have they negated the fear mongering by the BJP,” the party said.

O’Brien told reporters: "We started the meeting by stating that the CEC has blood on his hands. We raised five questions. After this, Kalyan Banerjee, Mahua Moitra, and Mamata Bala Thakur spoke and shared whatever they had to in about 40 minutes.

"Then the CEC spoke uninterrupted for one hour. We were also not interrupted while we spoke, but we did not receive any answer to any of our five questions," he said.

The SIR exercise is on in the poll-bound states of Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu along with Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Goa, Puducherry and the Union territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.