Special Intensive Revision: Leaders from RJD, CPI(M), CPI(ML) Liberation tomeet CEC

New Delhi, Jul 2 (PTI) Leaders of the RJD, CPI(M) and the CPI(ML) Liberation will meet the Chief Election Commissioner on Wednesday to take up the issue of Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, sources said.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary MA Baby, Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MPs Manoj Jha and Abhay Kumar Sinha will be part of the delegation, they said.

The INDIA bloc parties have been vocal in their opposition to the exercise of Special Intensive Revision, which has already started in Bihar, and is to be carried out in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal which will be going to the polls next year.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Bhattacharya had said that never before in India had electors been asked to prove their citizenship. He also said the onus was on the state to prove otherwise.

He demanded that the EC must withdraw the "arbitrary and utterly ill-planned and non-transparent fiat and conduct the elections on the basis of normal updating of the electoral roll as has been done in every election over the last two decades".

CPI(M) Politburo member Nilotpal Basu, in a letter to Chief Election Commission Gyanesh Kumar last week, urged the Election Commission to abandon the exercise.

He said that while review of electoral rolls is a normal and routine process, the proposals appear to be putting a major part of the responsibility for inclusion or deletion from the electoral rolls on the voters themselves.

The Election Commission of India has issued instructions to carry out a Special Intensive Revision in Bihar to weed out ineligible names and ensure all eligible citizens are included in the electoral roll, allowing them to exercise their franchise in the polls slated later this year.

The poll panel has said it has taken additional steps in the intensive revision to ensure illegal migrants do not get enrolled in the voters' list. PTI AO RT RT