Special Intensive revision: What Bengal speaks in it?
As India has already been hit by the wave of Special Intensive Revision-SIR, which was conducted in its first state in Bihar, it has left more than lakhs of voters fake, duplicate, deceased, untraceable and what not. But here is not where the story ends- the wave flowed to 12 more states for conduction of SIR and West Bengal is one of them.
In a total of 42 Constituencies in Bengal, the Election commissioner of India is expected to ensure that the electoral rolls are accurate and free to conduct fair elections by door to door verification. It also aims to include the names of voters who shifted here or their name has been excluded from the voter list. But the reality lies somewhere else when the I spoke to some person.
Vinoy Das, 43, a resident of Bandel, in Hoogly district has submitted the SIR form a few days ago. He said the whole process has been conducted so far nicely. The Booth level officer came to his place, explained everything written on it and gave a specific date for submission of the form. Luckily, he has all the necessary documents to fill in the details but he countered back with What if my father does not have sufficient documents? Will he not be considered a citizen of India? Well, his question soon collapsed by giving an example of his friend who lives nearby his home in Bandel. He said- “my grandfather has not voted since a long time, but is a citizen of India. He also does not have enough documents like a Birth certificate or 10th class certificate, as the situation at that time was different. My father hardly managed to balance the family and suddenly after decades, the government is saying they want proof to support that we are authentic voters! How is this supposed to work?”
Shaymal Roy, lives in Thakurpukur, he is a professor by profession in Bhawanipur college who is also working as a Booth Level Officer. He told, many BLO’s are committing suicide- reason? because they are mounted with work load. According to him, along with his duty in college, he is assigned for door to door verification. “The most difficult part of the work is to identify the house. Some people have changed their place, some are not present while I visit. This takes a lot of time, sometime half of the day went in searching the accurate address of the person. This situation added headache to us because at the end of the day we need to show our work. Thankfully- nobody from our office has done this. But my one question still remains the same is what is the need of conducting SIR? Wasn’t everything going right before and if not then what was the ECI doing for so long? It is clearly a game being played to the people of Bengal and other states.”
Like Das and Roy, Mita Biswas who stays in Nagarokhra is also filled with rage. BJP is clearly targeting the Bengalis. According to them, all Bengali people are from Bangladesh, whom they want to kick out from the country but this is not going to work. Our Didi- Mamta Banerjee, is with us who will fight the battle for the people of west Bengal and provide justice to them. Just because you are “so called clean-chit” it doesn’t mean others are wrong. Things will keep working like it used to, with or without SIR!- said Biswas.
While West Bengal has almost reached 90% of the completion process of SIR, the sentiment of people across the state speaks something very different. On one hand, it strengthened the backbone of democracy by ensuring every voter is counted. On the other hand the process must balance without bothering the citizens of the nation.
