ECI working on partisan agenda: TMC’s Abhishek

Trinamool Congress general secretary Abhishek Banerjee on Wednesday launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI) for working on a partisan agenda even as his party called the poll panel a “B team of the BJP.”

Banerjee, who is also the nephew of Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, besides being an MP, on Wednesday led a TMC delegation to meet the ECI authorities.

“We asked them several questions but barring a few, they failed to provide a clear answer for most of them,” Abhishek said, adding, “When we specifically asked them as how many Rohingyas or Bangladeshi infiltrators they had found during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, they failed to give any satisfactory reply,” Banerjee said.

His party, the TMC, on the other hand, said that the ECI at the instance of the BJP had launched a silent assault on the Indian democracy. “Under the cover of the so-called SIR exercise, the BJP’s B-Team Election Commission of India has carried out a silent assault on democracy in Bengal, secretly deleting the names of lakhs of legitimate voters without transparency, notice, or accountability,” it said.

Further alleging that the electoral roll was being weaponised, he appealed to all like-minded parties to pay attention to the voter list, saying the “vote chori”, a term being used by the Congress and opposition parties to allege irregularities in the election process, is happening in the voter list and not through EVMs.