Kolkata, Nov 21 (IANS) In an attempt to keep up the tempo of movement against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will be addressing an anti-SIR rally at Bangaon in North 24 Parganas district on November 25.
After the rally, she will also be participating in a protest march at Bangaon. This will be the second anti-SIR rally and protest march that the Chief Minister will be leading. The first rally was held in Kolkata on November 4.
Trinamool Congress insiders said that Bangaon has been chosen as the venue of the anti-SIR rally and protest march, considering the heavy concentration of people from the Matua community in those pockets.
Trinamool Congress had already started campaigning that the SIR would result in the deletion of the names of people from the Matua community. Matuas are a Hindu population from the backward class coming as refugees from neighbouring Bangladesh and settling in different districts of West Bengal, which have international borders with neighbouring Bangladesh.
Their concentrations are mainly in the Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts. The state BJP leadership has, however, assured the people from the Matua community that, other than illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators who managed to get their names enrolled in the voter list, no one else is required to worry about the revision exercise.
On Thursday, Mamata Banerjee wrote to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar asking the latter to keep the revision exercise on hold.
In the letter, she claimed that the manner in which the exercise had been thrust upon the electoral officials and citizens of the state was “unplanned, chaotic, and dangerous”.
The same day, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, also wrote to the CEC countering the letter from the Chief Minister.
In his letter, the LoP claimed that CM Banerjee’s letter to the CEC was a desperate attempt to sabotage the voter list purification drive through the SIR, and the contents of her letter were politically motivated and factually incorrect.
–IANS
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