Mamata uses art to protest voter roll revision, paints ‘SIR’ & ‘Vanish’

Kolkata: Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee, on Tuesday, turned to painting as a symbolic form of protest against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

She took up a canvas on her dharna stage and painted the words ‘SIR’ and ‘Vanish’, expressing her protest against alleged arbitrary deletions of names from the electoral rolls.

She took her sit-in protests against SIR on a separate level on Tuesday before officially ending it.

Banerjee drew with colours on a green board placed on a stand. On the top of the drawing board, she wrote “SIR”, while in the middle she wrote the word “Vanish” in white.

She also drew several small irregular circles and then something like a map, and later went on to whitewash parts of the green board, symbolising voters being erased from the electoral rolls. She was seen drawing when the CEC was holding a Press conference.

The ruling Trinamool Congress said that Banerjee used ‘art’ at the protest site to express resistance against what it described as “anti-Bengal forces” and to highlight opposition to the “flawed” revision exercise.

In the past, the Trinamool Congress chief has also referred to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) as “Vanish Kumar” while criticising the poll panel’s actions. However, she did not make any direct comment about the poll body chief during Tuesday’s protest.

Banerjee, over the past few days, has repeatedly accused the Election Commission of India of “dancing to the tunes of the BJP” and attempting to disenfranchise legitimate voters in the state.

Banerjee had started staging the sit-in on March 6 to protest against the Special Intensive Revision, alleging that the exercise had led to large-scale deletion of genuine voters in the state.

She, however, withdrew her sit-in protest on Tuesday.