A Trinamool delegation comprising MPs and state ministers on Wednesday knocked at the doors of the state’s chief electoral officer on the issue of Form 7, on which the Election Commission has come under attack from both the Trinamool and the BJP.

“From multiple districts across the state, we have received credible and verifiable reports of BJP members and booth level agents affiliated with the ruling party at the centre approaching the offices of the sub-divisional officer (SDO) and district magistrate (DM) as well as exerting undue pressure on electoral registration officers (EROs) and assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs) to bulk submission of Form 7,” the Trinamool delegation wrote in its letter to the CEO Manoj Agarwal.

Bengal’s ruling party has warned it could lead to a constitutional crisis if the commission does not stop the bulk submission of Form 7.

Any political party or a voter can submit Form 7 to object to the inclusion of the name of a voter in the voters list: it could be their own or someone known to them or any other person.

Once the Form 7 is submitted, the person being objected to is called for a hearing where he or she has to submit the relevant documents to prove their eligibility for inclusion in the electoral rolls.

On Tuesday, Mamata Banerjee cited the seizure of a car allegedly belonging to a BJP leader, which contained around 4,000 filled Form 7 documents, to claim there was a “larger conspiracy” to delete genuine voters in the state.

The state BJP president and Rajya Sabha MP Samik Bhattacharyya had alleged the booth level officers and other personnel owing allegiance to the state government were not allowing the BLAs belonging to the BJP to submit Form 7.

Samik Bhattacharyya.

The Trinamool delegation alleged the Form 7 was politically motivated and the objections baseless.

“These politically motivated and baseless objections are being filed not in good faith, but with the apparent and vested objective of engineering mass deletion of legitimate voters from the electoral rolls,” the letter read.

The delegation comprised MPs Partha Bhowmik, Saayoni Ghosh, ministers Manas Bhuniya, Shashi Panja and Trinamool leader Samir Chakraborty.

The Trinamool claimed thousands of pre-filled Form 7 objections found in Hooghly’s Chinsurah and Bankura’s Taldangra with allegedly forged signatures indicated at a coordinated and premeditated act.

“If true and the consistency of reports across districts suggests a systemic pattern, this represents nothing short of an undemocratic and unconstitutional abuse of the electoral machinery, aimed squarely at disenfranchising genuine voters of West Bengal,” the delegation said.

Apart from Chinsurah and Taldangra, the Trinamool claimed such incidents were reported in central Calcutta’s Jorasanko and in the districts in English Bazar, Moyna, Tamluk, Chandernagore and Barrackpore.

The Trinamool said the submission of bulk Form 7 was in violation of the central poll panel’s guidelines that restricted BLAs from submitting not more than 50 forms per day before the draft rolls are published and not more than 10 daily post-publication.

“It defies both logic and procedure as to how bulk submissions of Form 7 are being entertained at once by BLAs of a particular party, unless facilitated or encouraged in violation of established norms,” the delegation said.

The Trinamool’s Lok Sabha MP from Barrackpore, Partha Bhowmick, said the onus of proving the claims was on the person who raised the objections.

“The burden of proof lies with the person raising the objection, not with the voter against whom such objections are filed. Any inversion of this principle would amount to a fundamental subversion of due process and electoral fairness,” Bhowmick said.