Key Points
Trinamool forms two new electoral supervisory committees at panchayat and town levels
Committees aim to identify and prevent bogus voter registrations
I-PAC will provide training for committee members
Targets BJP's potential electoral manipulation
He issued this direction at a virtual meeting with the party leadership at different levels.
The prime issue of the virtual meeting was the identification of bogus voters in West Bengal.
One of the two micro-level tiers will be one at the panchayat level, which has been christened as the Panchayat Level Electoral Supervisory Committee.
The second tier will be at the town-level, which has been christened as the Town Level Electoral Supervisory Committee.
The formations of the committees will have to be completed by next month and they will start functioning by April 16 and continue to operate till the Assembly election next year.
The necessary training for that purpose to the members of the committee will be provided by Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), the Prashant Kishor-founded vote-strategy agency, that had been associated with Trinamool Congress since the 2021 West Bengal election.
These two micro-level tiers will be in addition to the existing-level committee in the same matter constituted and announced by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee last month.
Abhishek Banerjee's name is second in the list of members of the state-level committee, which is headed by the party's state president, Subrata Bakshi.
A party leader aware of the proceedings of the virtual meeting, said that Abhishek Banerjee also directed that the members of the two tiers will meet on a monthly basis, discuss the progress in the identification of the bogus voters, and update the state-level committee in the matter.
"The Trinamool Congress General Secretary at the virtual meeting said that BJP made a similar forgery in the electoral lists in Maharashtra before the Assembly elections there, by including voters from other states in the list. He also said that the opposition parties in Maharashtra were unable to identify the forgery in time, which our Chief Minister has been able to do. He also cautioned that in West Bengal, BJP's target is to delete the names of 25 lakh existing voters and replace them with the same number of new voters," the Trinamool Congress leader said.
