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The Trinamool Congress claimed on Monday before the Supreme Court that in 31 Assembly constituencies in West Bengal, the winning margin of the Bharatiya Janata Party was less than the number of persons deleted during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, Live Law reported
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Bengal top poll officer named as chief secretary
The Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal on Monday appointed Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal, who oversaw the special intensive revision of electoral rolls and the Assembly elections in the state, as the new chief secretary.
The chief secretary is the highest-ranking civil servant in a state and acts as the principal advisor to the chief minister and chief coordinator of inter-departmental affairs.
This came two days after Subrata Gupta, who was the special rolls observer for the special intensive revision exercise, was appointed as the advisor to West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari.
On Monday, the Trinamool Congress MP Sagarika Ghose described Agarwal’s appointment as “outrageous and brazen”.
“The so called ‘neutral umpire’ is rewarded with the post of top bureaucrat of the BJP dispensation in Bengal,” Ghose said on social media. “Does anyone still seriously believe the [West Bengal Assembly elections] were free and fair?”
Trinamool Congress spokesperson Saket Gokhale claimed that the BJP and the Election Commission were now being “open about stealing the election”.
“Are the courts blind or complicit?” Gokhale asked. “This is beyond shameless.”
TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien remarked in a sarcastic vein that the appointment was “purely a coincidence, surely”.
However, the state unit of the BJP said that the party’s government had appointed “the senior most IAS officer working in the state” as its chief secretary, “keeping with it’s promise to restore the dignity of the laws of the land”.
This was “unlike [ex-Chief Minister] Mamta Banerjee, who had subverted the bureaucracy by blatantly flouting the rules governing the IAS by superseding dozens of officers”, claimed the Hindutva party.
The BJP won 207 constituencies in the West Bengal elections, while the Trinamool Congress won 80 seats.
The election was preceded by a special intensive revision of voter rolls. The TMC had accused the Election Commission of arbitrarily deleting large numbers of voters through the special intensive revision exercise and had approached the Supreme Court against it.
Final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.
By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of the electorate before the process began, had been removed. Lakhs of cases challenging their removal from the voter list are pending before appellate tribunals.
Ahead of the elections, the TMC had also alleged that officials allegedly linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party were made part of the West Bengal polling process.
On April 8, it alleged that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar told a party delegation to “get lost” when it approached the poll panel to express concerns about the matter.
In a social media post that day, the Election Commission had referred to “straight-talk to Trinamool Congress” and said it had told Bengal’s ruling party that the Assembly polls this time would be “fear-free, violence-free, intimidation-free, inducement-free and without any chappa, booth-jamming and source-jamming”.
The TMC objected to the post, asking if this was how “a neutral constitutional body” was expected to behave.
Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sneha.
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Source: Scroll
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