An apex committee formed by the Trinamul Congress to check the alleged manipulation of the electoral roll met on Thursday and issued a slew of instructions for the party to cleanse the voter list.

Barring TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, all other 35 members of the committee were present at Trinamul Bhavan. Abhishek couldn’t make it to the meeting because he was purportedly busy overseeing a healthcare initiative in his Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency from Calcutta.

The meeting was convened by Trinamul state president Subrata Bakshi, the grand marshal of the putative old guard in the party. Ministers Firhad Hakim, Aroop Biswas and Chandrima Bhattacharya, the party’s state vice-president Jay Prakash Majumdar, and its leader in the Lok Sabha Sudip Bandyopadhyay are members of the committee.

The meeting was to examine its preliminary findings based on legwork at the grassroots in pursuit of the main purpose of weeding out “ghost” voters from the electoral roll in all of the state’s 81,000-odd booths.

At the meeting, the committee has instructed the party to list all names that aren’t legitimately eligible to be part of the Bengal electorate, document every case of two or more voter IDs with the same EPIC number, match every name on the roll by visiting electors in every part of each Assembly constituency — including all those who are legitimately eligible for being electors in the state but do not find their names on the roll — and reverify all names added through online processes.

Additionally, there were instructions to be on the lookout for Bangladeshi nationals who have managed to enrol themselves here.

“The 36-member committee was split into groups of three-four people and each group was assigned three-four districts to oversee the verification processes and coordinate with Trinamool Bhavan, to effectively conduct multiple layers of checks to ensure a thorough cleansing of the roll,” said minister Sujit Bose later.

In the evening, a delegation led by Bakshi visited the Bengal chief electoral officer and demanded that every voter have a unique ID number, besides a thorough physical verification, so that only those who were eligible to vote in Bengal were able to exercise their franchise in the state.

“The BJP is trying to turn the Bengal election into a joke.... It cannot be allowed to happen,” said minister Hakim after visiting the chief electoral officer.

“The commission cannot stay silent on this, nor can it be allowed to stay in a state of stupor on this matter most serious,” added minister Biswas.

Abhishek, to whom Trinamool’s so-called new guard pledges allegiance, is likely to conduct a meeting on the same matter on March 15, in the form of a virtual conference with district presidents and representatives from Trinamool’s frontal organisations.

“We were told he (Abhishek) is busy with work related to a healthcare initiative he has been conducting in his constituency.... We hope it is just that. He has convened the other meeting as a follow-up exercise, which is a good sign,” said a senior in the party who claims equidistance from the old and the new guards.