Clarify ‘discrepancies’ or face stir: TMC warns EC

Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Abhishek Banerjee on Saturday threatened to gherao the office of the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the national Capital if the poll panel doesn't release the list of voters who have been flagged for "logical discrepancies" during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal, as he intensified his criticism of the poll body on the day hearings began for 3.2 million "unmapped" voters across the state.

- HT Correspondent

"A TMC delegation will meet the chief election commissioner on December 31. We will set a deadline within which the poll panel will have to publish the details of voters with logical discrepancies. If it fails, we will gherao the commission. We have a list of more than 100 people who are alive but have been shown as dead in the draft roll. Why should FIR not be lodged against the ECI?," the TMC national general secretary told reporters in Kolkata.

He added: "Why is the EC not coming out with the list of names? Is this figure meant to reach the target of 1-1.5 crore that the BJP has set for deletions of names following the SIR in Bengal. "Gyanesh Kumar is the chief election commissioner, and he is answerable to the people of the country."

The ECI had released the draft roll of West Bengal on December 17, more than a month after the SIR was rolled out in the state, with around 5.8 million names being dropped.

On December 17, a senior official of the poll panel who asked not to be named had said that there are around 16.3 million voters have "logical discrepancies" in their enumeration forms. They have been divided into seven categories: those who have been