'TMC will back any motion by opposition to impeach CEC Gyanesh Kumar': Mamata Banerjee

Mamata Banerjee

• Mamata Banerjee open to impeachment motion against CEC if Opposition unites
• She claims SIR process targets minorities, deletes names from Bengal voter rolls.
• TMC walked out of EC meeting, citing humiliation by Chief Election Commissioner

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A day after meeting the officials from the Election Commission, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee indicated that her party will be amenable to an impeachment motion against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar if a united Opposition moves such a motion.

On Monday, the TMC chief and her delegation walked out of a meeting with Kumar and other election commissioners on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) issue, alleging humiliation by the poll panel chief.

The CM however, noted that the Opposition does not have the numbers necessary to force the motion through in Parliament. “But it will be good to have it on record,” she said.

Trinamool national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee by her side at a media conference in Delhi, Mamata paraded “victims” of the electoral roll-revision drive. These individuals — from around 90 families who either lost their kin during the SIR exercise or had their names deleted from the draft list — only replied in chorus to the questions Mamata asked.

Slamming the appointment of special micro observers from other states, Mamata said: “This (Bengal) is the only state where they are appointed.... It is against the election regulations, the statutory rules, that the roll observers.... BJP officers and 8,100 micro-observers, they are not listening to the DEO (district election officer), ERO or AERO. They have kept one separate login from where they are going to delete around 2 crore names.”

Speaking against the SIR process, Mamata said: "The BJP defended SIR claiming that it would remove “ghuspetiya” or infiltrators from the electoral rolls, but so far, it had not been able to produce any evidence to back the claim."

She further said that the exercise seemed to have targeted minorities. In West Bengal, 33% of the population are minorities. She asked, “Will you delete all of them?” She also pinpointed that CEC Kumar was the only one who spoke during Monday’s meeting, accusing him for “insulting” the Trinamool Congress and the voters who had come to meet him.