Cooch Behar: Living voters marked dead in draft rolls, BLO served notice

Cooch Behar: A show-cause notice has been issued to a Booth Level Officer (BLO) of the Falimari area under the Cooch Behar South Assembly constituency for wrongly listing living voters as deceased in the draft electoral roll, the District Election Officer said on Thursday.

The action followed complaints raised at a meeting held at the Cooch Behar District Magistrate’s office in the presence of Election Commission of India’s Special Roll Observer, Pankaj Yadav. The meeting was attended by election officials and representatives of all political parties to review issues linked to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists. The Trinamool Congress flagged multiple discrepancies in the draft rolls, including cases where living voters were marked as deceased, and demanded that Aadhaar cards be accepted during the hearing process for claims and objections.

The draft voter list, published on Tuesday, showed that around 1.13 lakh names were excluded from the electoral rolls in the district. Reports of anomalies surfaced from several areas the following day. In Falimari Gram Panchayat, Ashwini Adhikari and his wife Shivani Adhikari were erroneously listed as deceased despite being alive. District Trinamool Congress president Abhijit De Bhowmik said the party was informed that special camps would be organised for voters whose names were missing, but Aadhaar cards would not be accepted at these camps. “We requested that Aadhaar be allowed during hearings. We were told notices would be issued seven days in advance and assured that all issues would be examined,” he said.

District Magistrate and District Election officer Raju Mishra said: “Concerns raised by political parties were noted and confirmed that a show-cause notice had been issued based on the Falimari complaint.” BJP leader Nityanand Munshi questioned the low deletion rate in the border district, stating that only 4.55 per cent of names had been removed, and sought a thorough investigation.