Adjudication cloud over West Bengal election candidates

KAlita Majhi, 38, is the Bharatiya Janata company’s (BJP) prospect from Ausgram gathering constituency in e Burdwan, westward Bengal in the coming elections. She was the party’s candidate from the same constituency in the 2021 assembly polls also, but lost to the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) Abhedananda Thander by around 11,800 votes.Swati Khandoker, 59, is the TMC candidate from Chanditala in Hooghly and a sitting legislator. She has been contesting elections since 2006 and won four of them. In the 2021 election, she defeated Debashish Dasgupta of the BJP by 41,347 votesYet, Majhi and Khandoker are bound by something that spans the political divide –– and in West Bengal, there is none as deep as the one between the BJP and the TMC –– and also the gap between the elected and the defeated. They are among the six million voters whose eligibility to be part of the electoral roll is “under adjudication”. That translates into roughly 8.57% of the electorate. A simple extrapolation, assuming four candidates (conservatively) for each of the 294 assembly seats in the state, suggests that 100 could be “under adjudication”.“I am a four-time MLA from Chanditala in Hooghly. But still my name was included in the adjudication list. The error was due to the change of my surname. My party knew from the beginning that my name was under adjudication,” said Khandoker, whose surname changed from Dutta after marriage.The claims of Khandoker, and others, is “under adjudication” by court-appointed judicial officers, officials of the Election Commission (EC) have said.At least she knows why her name is “under adjudication”. Majhi doesn’t.“I submitted all documents. In my family, only my name is under adjudication. I have seven siblings. None of the names, including their family members, are in the adjudication list. I am not sure why my name was kept under adjudication,” she said.The BJP has published the names of 255 candidates for the two-phased polls. “We have only one candidate whose name is under adjudication,” said Rahul Sinha, a senior BJP leader.The ruling TMC has already announced the names of 291 candidates for the 294 assembly seats in the state, leaving three seats in the hills for the Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha. Party leaders said that names of many candidates, including sitting legislators and even ministers, have come under adjudication.Murshidabad and Malda, both bordering and Muslim-majority districts, have the highest number of cases under adjudication by judicial officers. While there are 11,011,45 such cases in Murshidabad, Malda with 8,28,127 cases, comes second.“I have two brothers and all three of our names are under adjudication. We have bidi factory, tea factory and chemical factory. We run schools and nursing homes and do a lot of charity. But still my name was wrongly included in the adjudication list. I informed TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee and he flagged my case in a recent public rally,” said Bayron Biswas, the TMC’s candidate from Sagaridhi assembly seat in Murshidabad.At least two other TMC candidates from the district including Jakir Hossain, fielded from Jangipur and Nur Alam, fielded from Samserganj, are also in the adjudication list. They didn’t respond to calls seeking comment. The name of Unus Sarkar, CPIM’s candidate from Jalangi in Murshidabad is also in the adjudication list.“I was a four term-legislator from 1991 to 2011. But still my name is under adjudication. The first supplementary list is expected to be published in a day or two. I expect that my name will be cleared. If not, we will take the legal course,” Sarkar said.Also “under adjudication” is the name of Md Ghulam Rabbani, state renewable energy minister and the TMC’s candidate from Goalpokhar in Uttar Dinajpur.“I come from a political family. My father contested the polls in 1995. I contested the elections in 2009, 2011, 2016 and 2021. But still my name is under adjudication. This is planned so that voters’ names are deleted from my constituency so that I will be defeated. I am grateful to Mamata Banerjee that she made me a candidate despite my name being under adjudication,” Rabbani told reporters.“The SIR has been conducted in so many states. In no other state such allegations have come up that it is a ploy to delete the names of genuine voters. Then why such allegations are coming up in West Bengal. It is because a major chunk of the TMC’s vote bank is fake voters. The TMC is scared because the SIR all these fake voters would be deleted and it would lose the battle,” said BJP’s Rahul Sinha.