Kolkata, Feb 16 (PTI) Senior BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari alleged on Monday that the Election Commission’s decision to suspend seven AEROs was the first time that the poll panel exercised its statutory authority to directly penalise officers found guilty of SIR-related misconduct, after being prodded by the Mamata Banerjee government to commit such acts.
The Commission reserved the right to move a step ahead and register FIRs against these officials if disciplinary proceedings against them were not initiated by the state at the earliest, said Adhikari, West Bengal’s Leader of the Opposition.
“It was an unprecedented move from the EC. No such steps were taken against government officials of any other state where the SIR exercise is being conducted. The officers indulged in serious violations of the Commission’s directives.
“They accepted fake school leaving certificates, PAN cards and notarized affidavits, as documents during the verification phase. They acted under pressure of the TMC and district top brass to include names of fake voters, as also under signals of the chief secretary,” the BJP leader alleged.
All EC-related files are supposed to be handled by the chief secretary’s office, he said. Instead, in Bengal, those files get forwarded to the CM who takes calls on what needs to be done, he said.
No other state does this, not even the Prime Minister during general elections, Adhikari added.
On Sunday, the Election Commission suspended seven officials at the level of assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs) with immediate effect for serious misconduct, dereliction of duty and misuse of statutory powers in connection with the ongoing SIR exercise in Bengal.
The poll authority has also directed state Chief Secretary Nandini Chakravorty to initiate disciplinary proceedings against these officials by their respective cadre controlling authorities immediately, without any delay and appraise the Commission in this regard.
Of the suspended AEROs, three are from Murshidabad district, two from South 24 Parganas and one each from Purba Medinipur and Jalpaiguri.
Responding sharply to the EC’s move, the Trinamool Congress claimed that the penalised officers were targeted since they chose not to bend before the poll body’s “whims”.
“The Commission was trying to over ride the decisions of EROs and AEROs in choosing eligible voters by deploying micro observers from BJP-ruled states. We moved Supreme Court to ensure that didn’t happen. The officers were suspended because they chose to keep their spinal cord erect. Whether they tried to enroll fake voters is an allegation that hasn’t been proved yet,” said Debangshu Bhattacharya, TMC’s IT cell head.
The hearings of the SIR’s verification phase in Bengal were concluded on Sunday amid apprehensions from non-BJP political outfits of large scale deletions of names from the final rolls which is scheduled to be published on February 28.
Names of over 58 lakh voters were deleted in the draft rolls published after the enumeration phase of the ongoing exercise. PTI SMY NN
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