How Mamata is playing ‘tu daal daal, main paat paat’ with EC to derail SIR

New Delhi: The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal has thrown up one number that cuts through all the spin: 2,208 polling booths where every single enumeration form has come back filled and not one voter has been flagged as dead, duplicate, shifted or untraceable.

The Election Commission itself has called such “perfection” “almost impossible” after 23 years without an intensive roll clean-up, especially at this scale. It has ordered district election officers in 22 of 24 districts to explain and re-verify these booths, as well as those showing only 1–10 “uncollectable” forms.

Across the rest of Bengal, SIR looks like a normal, messy clean-up: nearly 14 lakh forms have been flagged as uncollectable, each tied to absentee, duplicate, deceased or permanently migrated voters, with more than 80,600 BLOs and thousands of supervisors and officers deployed on the exercise.

Mamata all out to puncture SIR

What is playing out is Mamata Banerjee’s “tu daal daal, main paat paat” with the Election Commission over SIR.

While the EC comes with a once-in-decades clean-up, the ruling Trinamool Congress is out to do anything and everything to puncture the exercise and protect her vote bank.

This 100 per cent strike rate of enumeration forms being returned filled up in over 2,200 booths indicates that she is exerting pressure on the BLOs on the job.

At the same time, she is propagating the story that these same BLOs are under such extreme workload pressure that they are either committing suicide or dying from heart attacks.

Just months ago, the same exercise was conducted in Bihar successfully, with an even tighter timeframe, and there was virtually no such wave of complaints about suicides or heart attacks tied to SIR.

There, the government did not lean on BLOs to sabotage the process, and there was no big “BLO death” agitation. In Bengal, the same SIR has suddenly become a drama about “BLO genocide”.

So the real question is: how are Bengal’s BLOs under pressure in a way that Bihar’s were not?

The answer is hidden in those 100 per cent enumeration forms from over 2,200 booths.

If BLOs were simply crushed by workload, you would not get “perfect” data with zero dead or duplicate voters. You get that only when someone is making it clear what you are allowed to report and what you are not.

29 BLO deaths in 7 states, 39 ‘victims of SIR stress’ in Bengal

A simple compilation shows 29 BLO deaths in seven SIR states in 22 days: Madhya Pradesh (9), Uttar Pradesh (8), Gujarat (4), Rajasthan (3), West Bengal (3), Kerala (1) and Tamil Nadu (1).

These include heart attacks, strokes and a handful of clear suicides as families speak of long hours, late-night uploading and fear of suspension, while administrations blame pre-existing illnesses or personal stress.

In Bihar, by contrast, reporters note that “Bihar mein kisi BLO ko kuch nahi hua” in the political sense, and the Supreme Court has recorded that no one challenged the Bihar SIR in court.

In West Bengal, Mamata has now adopted the narrative officially. She has announced Rs 2 lakh ex gratia for the families of 39 people, including BLOs, whom she calls “victims of SIR stress”, citing strokes, suicides and panic over documents.

A Trinamool delegation has given the EC a list of around 40 such deaths, and some within the party talk of “60 tragedies” if you count civilians and BLOs together.

The EC, however, has described the claim of “around 40 deaths due to SIR in Bengal” as baseless and unverified, and has warned against threatening BLOs.

So Bengal now has a handful of widely reported SIR-linked deaths, a 23-death claim before the Supreme Court, a 39-name compensation list from the state and an EC that refuses to accept that “around 40” people died because of SIR.

EC’s handicap and Mamata’s saam, daam, dand, bhed

Another million-dollar question is: how will the Election Commission handle this situation? If it does not have its own staff and is dependent on state employees, who are visibly under duress, how will it ensure a fair process?

The EC has power on paper but no permanent field force. It must rely on BLOs and officers drawn from state cadres, the same machinery that answers daily to the chief minister. In Bengal today, that machinery is caught between the EC’s orders and Mamata’s political interest.

Mamata knows very well that a successful SIR will finish her party’s advantage in the state. A genuine roll clean-up will strip out dead, duplicate, migrated and illegal voters that keep margins padded in close seats. Hence, she is forced to apply all saam, daam, dand, bhed to puncture SIR. There is no other way to stop it.

From the public and the Supreme Court to Parliament

Such political issues are usually decided either in the court of public opinion or in the Supreme Court. On SIR, the opposition has failed to convince either.

The Supreme Court has refused to halt SIR, calling electoral roll revision a constitutional mandate and accepting that the EC is empowered to run intensive revisions, while keeping only a narrow window open to correct or strike down specific actions later if they are proved illegal.

In the public’s eyes, cleaning up voter rolls is not an obviously sinister project. The opposition has not been able to sell SIR as a mass disenfranchisement conspiracy, and the Bihar election results proved it.

As a result, the Opposition is now hell-bent on taking it to Parliament.

Earlier, when the government or BJP leaders answered questions on SIR and the EC, the opposition demanded to know why they were “defending” the Commission. Now, the same Opposition wants SIR debated in Parliament and the government put in the dock on an EC process.

A debate on electoral reforms is scheduled for Tuesday and will touch upon SIR as well. As expected, the opposition will propagate SIR as unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court does not see any merit in that charge so far.

In the end, SIR will not stop. The opposition will try to score brownie points by shouting “voter purge” and waving lists of alleged deaths.

The government is ready to debate with the conviction that the public is not with the opposition on this issue.

But if past sessions are any indication, the opposition is likely to spit and scoot as usual. It will walk out the moment the government starts answering point by point.