1.25 crore names could go off voters’ lists: Adhikari

With just about a week to go for the submission of enumeration forms for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) sources in the Election Commission of India (ECI) office have said that about 5.5 crore enumeration forms have already been issued whereas about 14 lakh forms have so far been identified as “uncollectable” in Bengal.

This, even as Bengal Opposition leader on Thursday iterated that more than 1.25 crore names of fake or dead or Bangladeshi voters could be deleted from the electoral rolls in a month’s time.

The forms thus referred were “uncollectable” because the voters were either dead, had left the area concerned or their names duplicated, officials said, adding this figure could have gone to about 22 lakhs by Thursday. On Monday, the figure was 10.33 lakh on Monday whereas on Tuesday it stood at about 13.92 lakh, sources said.

The ECI sources said that about 80,600 booth-level officers (BLOs), along with around 8,000 supervisors, 3,000 Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) and 294 Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), have been engaged for the revision exercise in Bengal.

The ECI officials in Kolkata would not however, elucidate whether they had till now calculated the total number of names that could get deleted just on account of dead, absentee, permanently shifted or duplicated voters.

Some of them, however, said that the present figure of 22-25 lakh could be compared with the 47 lakh names that had been provided by the Aadhar authorities to the ECI. “It has to be calculated whether this 14-25 lakh of voters that we are finding now as duplicated, dead, or absentee is counted within the 47-lakh made available by the Aadhar authorities or whether it is outside it.”

Meanwhile, even as a section of BLOs continued to protest against what they called “inhuman treatment” allegedly meted out to them by the ECI “which has sent us to fight without a gun,” Bengal Opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari said that at least 1.25 crore names of fake or dead voters could get deleted from the voters’ lists.

“The calculation is simple… if you take out 50 lakh dead voters — which was almost entirely used by the TMC which was just a few percent ahead of us in previous two polls — and another 50 lakh or so on account of illegal infiltrators then you almost have reached that figure… so when I say it could be 1 crore to 1,25 crore what wrong I say,” Adhikari said.

Elsewhere, Union Minister Sukanta Majumdar slammed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for trying to spike the SIR process “because she is afraid of losing the elections… the message has gone clear and loud to her that her kingdom is falling,” Majumdar said, adding how while the rest of the country was welcoming SIR, it was only the TMC which was opposing it.

“The SIR has been welcomed by every bona fide citizen of Bengal, but only the TMC ministers and other leaders are opposing it. This is because they now know that, as the names of unauthorised infiltrators that constituted Mamata Banerjee’s vote bank are thrown out of Bengal, the TMC will be go out of power,” Majumdar said, adding the TMC leaders, including Banerjee, had gone berserk with the outcome of SIR where lakhs of names were being deleted.”

On the steady flight of Bangladeshi infiltrators from Bengal through Nadia, Murshidabad, North 24 Parganas and Malda borders, Adhikari said, “SIR has poured carbolic acid into the snake holes and now the snakes are coming out and fleeing.”