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A 10-member delegation of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) will meet Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar in New Delhi on Wednesday, a party press note said.
The delegation led by TMC National General Secretary and Lok Sabha MP Abhishek Banerjee will brief the media outside Nirvachan Sadan following the meeting. The meeting comes amid the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state, which has created a tussle between the TMC-led state government and the Centre. According to the press note, the delegation will include the party's chief whip in Rajya Sabha, Md Nadimul Haque, MPs Derek O'Brien, Kalyan Banerjee, Mamata Thakur, Saket Gokhale and Ritabrata Banerjee, alongside party leaders Pradip Mazumdar, Chandrima Bhattacharya and Manas Bhunia. Over 58.2 lakh names were deleted during the enumeration period of the SIR exercise in the state. The ECI had published the draft voter list for West Bengal on December 16. The claims and objections period is underway from December 16 to January 15, 2026. The final electoral roll will be published on February 14, 2026. Meanwhile, a five-member TMC delegation submitted a memorandum to the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal on December 29, demanding that the list of voters under the "Logical Discrepancy" category be published and that the methodology and legal authority used to create this category be disclosed. Calling the Election Commission, the BJP's "B-team", the TMC posted on X, "Under the cover of the so-called SIR exercise, the BJP's B-Team Election Commission has carried out a silent assault on democracy in Bengal, secretly deleting the names of lakhs of legitimate voters without transparency, notice, or accountability. To demand answers for this institutional misconduct, our five-member delegation once again went to the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal." "Our position is unambiguous and non-negotiable: The entire list of voters branded under the vague and arbitrary label of "Logical Discrepancy" must be published immediately, with clear Assembly-constituency-wise and category-wise break-ups. The criteria, methodology, and legal authority used to create this category must be placed in the public domain without delay. For senior citizens above 85 years of age and persons with disabilities, all verification, hearings, and authentication under SIR must be conducted at their homes, not through queues designed to intimidate and exclude. On these demands, our five-member delegation submitted a memorandum to the State Election Commission. Bengal will not accept a democracy run through deletions, fear, and silence," the X post read. (ANI)
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