West Bengal Political Battle: TMC's Motion Against ECI Sparks Voter List Crisis

Although the exact date for commencement of the Winter Session of the House was yet to be finalised, it is expected to start either in the third or fourth week of November.

"The manner in which the ECI has started SIR in West Bengal has created panic among a large section of the people in West Bengal. The panic is evident from the several suicides and suicide attempts in the state. In such a situation, the party's legislative team in the state Assembly thinks that a motion against the exercise should be brought on the floor of the House during the forthcoming Winter Session to officially record the party's apprehensions and objections about the exercise. So the party's legislative team had sent a proposal to the party high command," said a member of the state cabinet on condition of anonymity.

On Tuesday, the first day of the first stage of the three-stage SIR, Trinamool Congress has organised a mega rally in Kolkata, from where the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, and Trinamool Congress general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, had warned of bigger mass movements against the ECI, in case the "name of any genuine voter in the state is deleted from the voters' list".

Trinamool Congress has been opposing SIR since the beginning, describing it as the BJP and the Union government's "ploy to slap the National Register of Citizens in West Bengal".

However, the BJP claimed that the Trinamool Congress was opposing the SIT because of the "fear" of the deletion of names of their "dedicated vote banks (Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators" from the electoral rolls.

In the first stage of the SIR, booth-level officers are reaching voters' doorsteps with enumeration forms.

- IANS