EC: Verify addresses of unrecognised registered political parties in state

Kolkata: The State Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has recently instructed District Election Officers (DEOs) to verify the addresses of unrecognised registered political parties across the state and submit a report to the Commission.

The directive comes amid growing concerns over the existence of several such parties, many of which have neither participated in elections for over a decade nor responded to official communications.

According to sources, the Election Commission reports 8 recognised and nearly 70 unrecognised registered political parties.

The nationwide number of such unrecognised registered political parties is 3000.

The CEO office recently held a virtual meeting with the district magistrates who are the district election officers and instructed them to carry out field verification of such addresses to ascertain their existence.

In the last Lok Sabha polls held in 2024 only 18 such parties contested in the elections.

The Commission’s communication to the addresses of many of these parties has elicited no reply.

“We have every reason to believe that either these political parties have winded up or they have shifted to some other address about which we are in the dark,” said a senior EC official.

As per rules, all political parties whether recognized or non recognized are supposed to send their audit report associated with income- expenditure to the Commission; however, the poll body has not received such report from the majority of these unrecognized parties. In this backdrop, the Commission is in serious doubts about the existence of these political parties or whether their presence is now merely on paper.

There are parties like ‘Amra Bangali’, ‘Paradise Party’, ‘Bahujan Mukti Party’, ‘All India Labour Party’, ‘Bhumiputra Party’, Hindustan Shakti Sena etc who have not been part of the electoral process for quite a long time.

This situation is not all different in the rest of the country as well and so the Commission wants to initiate the process of cancellation of such unrecognised parties that have remained only on paper.

The CEO office has directed the DEOs to find out whether these parties have taken part in the last three elections and whether they have submitted any audit report of their expenditure and include the same in their respective reports.