Key Points

The advice was given at a crucial meeting of the party in Kolkata on Friday. The meeting was attended by the Union Minister Bhupender Yadav and the party's Lok Sabha member and former Tripura Chief Minister, Biplab Kumar Deb, who had been appointed last month as the in-charge and deputy-in-charge, respectively, for the party’s campaign for the crucial West Bengal assembly polls scheduled next year.

The meeting was also attended by the party's central observers for West Bengal, Sunil Bansal and Amit Malviya, as well as the top state-level leaders.

A member of the party’s state committee in West Bengal said that the direction to refrain from making SIR-related predictions was given amid a couple of leaders recently claiming that names of over a crore of illegal voters, mainly illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators, would be deleted from the voters’ list of West Bengal after SIR.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee immediately reacted to those and claimed that such predictions by the state BJP leaders was evidence that the Election Commission of India (ECI) was operating on the behest of the BJP and the Union government.

“Our party’s central leadership cautioned against any statement by the state leaders that might give Trinamool Congress and the Chief Minister some political advantage and hence directed the state leadership to refrain from SIR-related predictions,” the state committee member said.

In the meeting, he added, the central leadership advised the state leaders to concentrate on strengthening the organisational structure, especially the booth-level network in the state, to ensure that booth-level agents for each and every booth in the state for the SIR can be appointed.

The central leadership also gave an outline on the role of booth level agents to ensure that the commission’s exercise to prepare an error-free voters’ list in the state before the Assembly election next year.

- IANS