Murshidabad fully prepared for smooth, violence-free polls: CEO

Kolkata: Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal made a field visit to Murshidabad on Saturday and declared there was “no crisis” in the district and promised a “Durga Puja-like” election atmosphere in one of Bengal’s most politically sensitive and electorally contentious regions.

Agarwal, who had visited Nandigram last weekend, sent out a reassurance message on both law and order and voter confidence, insisting that the villages he visited showed no signs of fear, intimidation or threat.

He described the polling infrastructure as among the best he had seen and said the district was fully prepared for a smooth, violence-free poll.

The choice of Murshidabad is significant. The district has emerged as the epicentre of controversy over large-scale deletions in the SIR adjudication process, with the highest number of names struck off from the rolls. Agarwal sought to defuse the criticism by stressing that the deletions followed Supreme Court-backed judicial adjudication and were not done directly by the Election Commission machinery. He said tribunals were already functional, appeals were being filed, and genuinely eligible voters would get their names restored through due process.

The state CEO office informed that Deputy Director Apurva Kumar Singh and Ranjeet Srivastava , senior Video Editor of the Election Commission of India, will be in Bengal from April 13 to 17 to review Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation(SVEEP) events and media activities .