New Delhi: A delegation of Trinamool Congress MPs Friday met Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and told him that he had “blood on his hands”, linking the deaths of at least 39 people including four Booth Level Officers (BLOs) in West Bengal to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The TMC delegation, comprising five Lok Sabha and five Rajya Sabha MPs, met the full bench of the Election Commission in Delhi in a meeting that lasted around one and a half hours.
“We started the meeting by stating that the CEC has blood on his hands. We raised five questions,” TMC Rajya Sabha MP and floor leader Derek O’Brien told reporters after the meeting. The TMC MPs were allotted 40 minutes to share their views, following which Kumar spoke for around one hour.
Derek O’Brien stressed that the TMC was not opposed to the concept of SIR, “but we are strongly opposed to the unplanned and heartless manner in which the CEC and the Election Commission is going about their job, completely heartless”.
At the meeting, the TMC delegation submitted a list of names allegedly affected by SIR. According to the party, there have been 39 deaths, including four BLOs, due to the SIR. Additionally, 15 BLOs are undergoing medical treatment after falling ill due to the stress associated with the exercise, the party claimed.
“Who will take responsibility for these lives lost? The Election Commission or CEC Gyanesh Kumar? We have seen how the BLOs received insufficient training, next to no support, were burdened with unrealistic deadlines and pressured until many of them finally succumbed to illness or death. Is the blood of these avoidable deaths not on the Chief Electoral Commissioners’ hands?” one TMC MP said in the meeting.
Sources said that among the five questions raised by the delegation, one concerned the “real purpose” of the SIR. It alleged that Bengalis were being singled out and targeted in the name of cleaning up voter rolls, indicating that the party intends to use the Bengali identity issue in pushing back against the SIR ahead of the 2026 West Bengal assembly polls.
TMC Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra later told reporters outside the EC office that the CEC feigned ignorance about the deaths that many in the Opposition have attributed to “inhuman pressure” by the ECI.
“If infiltration is the issue, why are states like Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur, which border Bangladesh and Myanmar, left out of the process? Even in Assam the EC failed to institute the SIR, instead choosing an eyewash by the name of Special Revision,” Moitra said.
Phase II of the SIR, announced by the EC, covers 12 states and Union Territories, including Uttar Pradesh, and election-bound West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
Assam also goes to polls in early 2026, but the EC excluded the state from this SIR round, pointing out that it is subject to different citizenship provisions under the law and that a Supreme Court supervised citizenship verification process, the National Register of Citizens, is already underway there.
Instead, the EC has ordered a separate Special Revision of electoral rolls in Assam, involving house-to-house verification by booth level officers rather than the full SIR enumeration process.
The TMC delegation also argued that if the same electoral rolls “that the ECI now questions” were good enough for the 2024 general elections, then they should be acceptable now as well.
“How did those rolls suddenly become unreliable within a year? And if the rolls really are unreliable then why not dissolve the Lok Sabha that was elected by these unreliable voters,” Moitra said.
The TMC MPs also raised the recent amendment in the criteria for the appointment of Booth Level Agents or BLAs. They are appointed by political parties to complement the work of the BLOs, who are usually government employees. Until the amendment, a BLA had to be a registered voter of the booth where they served.
Under the amended rule, BLAs do not need to be from the same booth but can be from any booth within the assembly constituency. “Does this not reek of bias and partisan practice, which you seek to address, ultimately to the detriment of your constitutional autonomy?” asked the delegation.
“In Bengal, BJP leaders are claiming that the names of one crore voters will be deleted from the rolls. The ECI has taken no cognisance of these comments, nor have they countered the fear mongering by the BJP. That leads us to ask two questions. Is the ECI working on the command of the BJP? Is every sacrosanct provision now open to tampering to suit a single political party’s agenda?” the TMC delegation added in its submission.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: He didn’t sleep for days. Inside the SIR pressure that broke a Rajasthan BLO