Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee on Tuesday has a issued a sharp call demanding resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah amidst the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) controversy. He has called for dissolution of Lok Sabha, questioning the legitimacy of the voter list that elected leaders a year back but Election Commission of India (ECI) now finds faulty. “If you want to do SIR then first dissolve Lok Sabha and make every elected MP resign including the prime minister, the home minister and the entire cabinet. Do SIR across the country for 140 crore people and then have elections again. We have no problem. Even I will resign”, said Banerjee at Kolkata airport before leaving for New Delhi
Framing his plea as a matter of democratic fairness, Banerjee challenged the legitimacy of the current Parliament, noting that “the same voter list that was used for Lok Sabha election had elected Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister. If there were illegitimacies in that voter list then the election was illegitimate." He criticized the selective scrutiny of electoral rolls, saying, “Voter revision can’t be selective. It is fine when Lok Sabha election happens, there’s no issue with voter list when elections happened in Maharashtra, Haryana or Delhi - stats where BJP won handsomely and then suddenly you can’t find faults in voter list ahead of Bihar election. You can’t say voter list is fine in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh but not fine in non‑BJP ruled states – Bengal or Tamil Nadu." His message was clear: SIR should be applied uniformly with fresh elections following if there are questions over voter list credibility.
SIR as a door‑to‑door exercise to update the electoral rolls, aimed at correcting errors, eliminating duplicates, removing deceased voters, and including omitted eligible voters- was commissioned in poll bound Bihar last month by the ECI. As per ECI over 65 lakh names have been eliminated from the revised voter list in Bihar. Bihar Assembly elections are due in November and opposition has questioned the intent in launching an exhaustive exercise like SIR so close to the election. BJP has also claimed that SIR will be done in Bengal where elections are due early next year.
Banerjee also condemned the police action against opposition MPs during a protest in Delhi on Monday. Strongly denouncing the treatment meted to female legislators, he stated, "I strongly condemn the way Delhi police resorted to high handedness to stall the opposition MPs yesterday. The MPs were marching towards ECI office. They were stopped. Female MLAs were roughed up, some were dragged by their hair. This is not democracy." He called it a failure of the ECI in restoring public faith in their functioning. “This shows the ECI has no answers to our questions. All we wanted was to meet with the CEC. Mamata Banerjee first exposed voter duplication in February - how Haryana voters shared EPIC number with that of a Bengal voter, now LoP Rahul Gandhi exposed certain discrepancies. If they are not genuine then ECI should come out clean. We demand that Election Commission should initiate FIR against former CEC Rajiv Kumar under whose office such discrepancies have happened”, he added.
