EC Full Bench Reaches Kolkata, To Meet Parties on Monday

Kolkata: The full bench of the Election Commission, led by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, reached the city on Sunday evening on a three-day visit to supervise preparations for the Assembly polls amid Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's dharna against the large-scale deletion and logical discrepancy-linked ‘adjudication’ of voters' names in the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR).

Apart from Mr Kumar, two Election Commissioners– Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi– are also in the team that was received by Chief Electoral Officer West Bengal Manoj Agarwal. When the EC team, escorted by the police in a convoy, was travelling from the airport to a hotel in New Town for check-in, a group of people, apparently backed by Trinamul Congress, showed them black flags at Kaikhali for protest. They will meet representatives of the eight political parties and top brass of the state government throughout Monday, after visiting Kalighat Temple and Belur Math. On Tuesday, Mr Kumar will brief the media.

Recently, the EC deleted 63.66 lakh names in the first two phases of the SIR and put another 60.06 lakhs ‘under adjudication for logical discrepancies which are being sorted out by judges under the supervision of the Calcutta High Court Chief Justice Sujoy Pal on the orders of the Supreme Court. The total number of names under ‘adjudication' has come down to around 54 lakhs after scrutiny in the last one week. The EC earlier visited poll-bound Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry.