Mamata Banerjee commences indefinite sit-in over voter list revision

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee began an indefinite sit-in protest at Esplanade East, Kolkata, against the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of the voters’ list. The demonstration, located close to the Chief Electoral Officer’s office, coincides with the arrival of the Election Commission’s full bench in the city.

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will start her indefinite sit-in demonstration at Esplanade East in Central Kolkata from Friday afternoon against the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.

As scheduled, Trinamool Congress workers and leaders will start assembling at Esplanade East this morning. The Chief Minister is expected to arrive at the venue at around 2 p.m. and start the demonstration.

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“As of now, it has been decided that the sit-in demonstration will be for an indefinite period. Our main demands are that not a single genuine voter should be excluded from the voters’ list and the forthcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal should not be conducted while keeping out the 63 lakh cases currently under judicial adjudication from the voters’ list,” a senior Trinamool Congress leader said.

Incidentally, the venue of the Chief Minister’s sit-in demonstration is barely 1.5 kilometres away from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal. The Chief Minister’s indefinite demonstration is starting just before the full bench of the ECI led by the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, is arriving in Kolkata on the night of March 8 with a packed schedule for the next two days.

A massive stage has been set up at the venue of the sit-in demonstration at Esplanade East. Although the Trinamool Congress leadership did not give any indication on how long the demonstration would continue, from the size of the stage and the amenities arranged there, it seems the protest would continue for quite some time.

Incidentally, the CPI(M) was also holding a prolonged 24-hour sit-in demonstration in front of the CEO’s office, which began on Wednesday afternoon and ended on Thursday afternoon over the same demand that there should be no election in the state unless the ongoing judicial adjudication of the voters’ documents classified under the “logical discrepancy” category is completed.

Veteran CPI(M) leader and the Left Front chairman in West Bengal, Biman Bose, has claimed that their representatives will raise the same demand in their interaction with the full bench of the Election Commission of India on March 9.

Congress, too, has sent a communique to the ECI raising the same demand for polling after the completion of the judicial adjudication process.