Kolkata, Nov 20 (IANS) The Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in West Bengal Assembly and senior BJP leader, Suvendu Adhikari, on Thursday, has written a letter to the to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, after the letter from the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to CEC Kumar earlier in the day demanding an immediate halt of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.

In his letter, LoP Adhikari had dismissed Mamata Banerjee’s claims in her letter to the CEC, claiming that the SIR was thrust in West Bengal in an unplanned, chaotic, and dangerous manner, which created panic among the common citizens as well as excessive workload on the electoral officers, especially the booth-level officers (BLOs).

In his letter, the LoP had claimed that Mamata Banerjee’s letter to the CEC was a desperate attempt to sabotage the voters’ list purification drive through the SIR and the contents of her letter were “politically motivated” and “factually bogus”.

He had also claimed that the Chief Minister’s move to send the letter to the CEC to halt the SIR process in the state was not about protecting the genuine voters but was a panic-driven attempt to protect the bogus voters in the form of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators who managed to get their names included in the voters’ list.

Earlier on Thursday, the LoP issued a statement levelling allegations that the pressure on the BLOs in the state is not because of the SIR-related workload as claimed by Chief Minister Banerjee, but because of the undue pressure on them from the district magistrates, also the district electoral officers (DEOs) to resort to unethical practices in relation to the revision exercise.

In the statement, LoP Adhikari alleged that in districts like East Midnapore, Hooghly, and East Burdwan, among others, the district magistrates, also the DEOs, were acting as full-time Trinamool Congress election agents by putting pressure on the BLOs to share their official OTPs either with the district magistrates or with the ruling Trinamool Congress activists appointed as the data entry operators.

–IANS

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