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Kolkata: A petition has been filed in the Calcutta High Court on Friday, seeking court-monitored Special Intensive Review (SIR) in West Bengal.
A division bench of Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Smita Das Dey of the Calcutta High Court has accepted the petition.
The petitioner has also sought the court’s intervention to extend the time period for conducting the revision exercise.
Also, the petitioner has prayed the Calcutta High Court to direct the Election Commission of India (ECI) to give a detailed explanation on why the SIR exercise is necessary.
Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar announced the SIR for 12 states, including West Bengal, earlier this week. The first phase of the three-phase SIR exercise in West Bengal will begin from November 4.
The draft list will be published on December 9, after which any political party or individual voter will be able to register their complaints on the draft list, which will be addressed by the ECI, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of West Bengal.
Eventually, the final voter list will be published by the ECI on February 7 next year.
Trinamool Congress has already raised objections over the time period during which the SIR exercise will be conducted. Party general secretary and Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee had earlier this week claimed that if the real objective is to prepare an error-free voter list, then the revision should be done in a sufficient period and not in a hurry.
He said, “Their aim is not to make the voter list error-free. In fact, SIR stands for ‘Silent Invisible Rigging’. The last time such a revision was done in West Bengal, it took almost two years to complete the exercise. Now, they are claiming that it will be completed in just two months.”
On the other hand, the BJP has claimed that the Trinamool Congress’s opposition to the vetting process was due to their fear that the names of illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya voters would be removed from the voter list.
–IANS