Kolkata, Aug 31: TMC may oppose the proposed Special Intensive Revision (SIR) politically, but on the ground, it has deployed a strategy combining administrative outreach with grassroots mobilisation to fight what it calls a “design by the BJP and the Election Commission” to disenfranchise voters.
Drawing lessons from Bihar, where opposition parties accused the EC of deleting names without proper verification during the SIR exercise, the ruling party in Bengal has activated its cadre down to the booth level.
The TMC is banking on its organisational muscle spread across 80,000 booths, likely to increase to 94,000, and is conducting workshops, training programmes, and setting up task forces to monitor the revision process.
“In India, the TMC is the only political party with an intensive booth-level organisation prepared to counter any review of voter lists. This has been embedded in the party’s culture for the past 25 years. We are opposed to SIR,” TMC state vice-president Jaiprakash Majumdar said.
Majumdar said special instructions have been relayed to the booth level for checking electoral rolls.
“The entire organisation, including the party’s frontal units, has been engaged for a seamless and error-free workflow. In recent meetings, our national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee has put special emphasis on accountability in this work,” he said.
The SIR has already sparked political controversy in Bihar, where the electorate dropped from 7.9 crore to 7.24 crore after over 65 lakh names were excluded in the first phase of the revision.
The EC had claimed that 22,34,501 people, registered in the electoral rolls, were found to be dead during the exercise.
Another 36.28 lakh have ‘permanently shifted’ out of the state or were ‘not found’ at their stated addresses, and 7.01 lakh have been found enrolled at ‘more than one place’.
Bengal has about 7.6 crore voters, and the ruling TMC fears a repeat of Bihar.
To pre-empt such a scenario, the Mamata Banerjee government has aligned its flagship public outreach schemes such as Duare Sarkar and Amar Para, Amar Samadhan with the political task at hand. These camps, attended by over one crore people in just 26 days, are now being used to provide missing documents, residence certificates, caste certificates, family registers, land papers, and forest rights certificates, after proper verification, to those who lack them, apart from addressing civic and governance issues.
“Through ‘Duare Sarkar’ camps, many rural people who can’t afford to travel to district headquarters are being provided certificates. Whenever the SIR starts, we will ensure that no genuine voter goes without documentation,” a senior TMC leader said.
Party leaders claim that demand at these help desks has surged.
“Earlier, we used to get 70-80 people a day for documentation. Now, nearly 500 people are coming who either don’t have land or caste certificates or have lost them. Our volunteers are helping them,” said a TMC leader from North 24 Parganas.
In the past week, Abhishek Banerjee has held meetings across seven organisational districts in North Bengal, comprising 44 assembly segments, where TMC slipped from 24 assembly seats in 2021 to the equivalent of 20 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, reviewing booth-level performance with granular data. (PTI)
