Trinamul Congress Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee today took up in Parliament the untimely deaths due to SIR (Special Intensive Revision) in West Bengal. He cited the 40 deaths due to panic amongst the people after the SIR exercise was launched in the state.
He said: “People are dying or are scared of the SIR process in West Bengal. Many have fallen ill in the last 33 days. Many of them are BLOs. Four BLOs have died in WB. They are scared of finishing work within the deadline. These are institutional killing. The Centre is trying to finish two years’ job in two months.”
He took the names of the deceased like Namita Hansda in East Burdwan, in Jalpaiguri Santimoni Oraon, in Nadia’s Kishnagar Rinku Tarafdar and in Murshidabad Zakir Hussain. He said there is hardly any district left in Bengal where BLOs have not been affected by this exercise.
“This is an exercise in haste, completely indifferent to its human choices. The result is predictable and unforgivable. The BLO app is not working in most of the day hours. These BLOs are working from midnight to 5 in the morning to upload information. If they try to complain on the issue, they are threatened with disciplinary actions against them,” said Ritabrata, citing his experience staying in ground zero.
We have a question: Is this hurried exercise a policy failure? He asked if weeding out illegal voters is the intention, why other border states like Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur were left out?
“Why the electoral roll of 2024 suddenly become unreliable and why is this Union government elected from the exercise, be dissolved? People from the BJP are quoting figures that one crore plus voters will be deleted. How can they say this and create panic amongst people. Why is no action being taken against them?” asked the MP.
He said that he had visited houses of Narendra Nath Roy in Jalpaiguri, and Bhuvan Chandra Roy and Kamala Roy in November, where the deceased’s daughters have shown him voter slips of 2023, 2024 elections. Forty people have died in Bengal due to this exercise.
“The people who are propagating the concept of ‘Hindu voters’ and ‘Muslim voters’ will never succeed in Bengal,” concluded Ritabrata.