Out of the 294 “war rooms” set up by the Trinamool Congress leadership to monitor each and every step of the booth-level officers, reports of the BLOs being “man marked” by the TMC workers continued to come for the second consecutive day from various constituencies in Bengal.
About 80,681 BLOs had been deputed across 294 Assembly constituencies to distribute 7.66 crore enumeration forms as a part of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that started on November 4 in the State.
Reports of BLOs being trailed by tens of TMC workers bearing party flags from Howrah, Hooghly, and Murshidabad, sources said, adding in many places the officials were literally being coerced into delivering enumeration forms to the TMC leaders for distribution.
“While each political party is authorised to send a Booth Level Agent II with the BLOs, the ground-level story looked quite different, as in several cases the BLOs were being accompanied by not only one BLA but a band of TMC workers,” said Kaustav Chattopadhyay of the CPI(M). BJP and Congress leaders too held out similar complaints.
In booths at Jagatballavpur in Howrah district, BLOs were seen being accompanied by TMC workers apart from the designated party BLAs. When asked the BLOs about why the TMC workers were coming with them, he said he had “no power or physical force to drive them away, as I am only one person here and cannot take them on,” adding, however, that “none of the TMC men had committed any mischief with the documents.
“Similar reports came from Khanakul in Hooghly district, where only TMC BLAs were moving around with the BLOs, and those from other parties had “simply been asked to leave. As it happens on election day, when the polling agents are forced out of polling booths.”
When asked as to whether this was the part of the alleged “man-marking of the BLOs” that had been directed by the TMC leadership, a state-level leader and an MLA said, “We are silent soldiers of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee and have been asked to man-mark the BLOs. We have been told by the leadership that the BLOs must not be out of sight even for a minute. So apart from a BLA, a number of party men are following the BLOs. This is not illegal, as they are keeping a watch from a distance. Any citizen can do it. We are not carrying arms or intimidating the BLOs. They are doing their duty, and we are doing ours.”
At Bhagoban Gola in Murshidabad district, one BLO was seen doing his “duty” even more diligently this time by handing over a bunch of enumeration forms to a local booth-level president of the TMC. When asked to explain his conduct, he said he had no inkling about the political antecedents of the TMC leader. Back in Kolkata, too, a BLO was seen distributing enumeration forms from a tea shop in the Rashbehari constituency.
When asked as to why he was not visiting the houses, he said he had to distribute the forms from the tea shop because “there was a server problem and my app was not working. So I came downstairs and tried to get my server connection.”