EC must immediately demonstrate it's not operating under BJP’s shadow: Congress
New Delhi (PTI): Upping the ante over its 'vote chori' pitch, the Congress on Tuesday said the Election Commission's conduct during the SIR process has been "deeply disappointing" and demanded that the poll body must immediately demonstrate that it is not operating under the BJP’s shadow.
Congress president Mallikrjun Kharge also alleged that the BJP is attempting to weaponise the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls process for "vote chori", as he chaired a meeting with key office bearers of 12 states and Union territories where the SIR is underway.
Kharge, former party chief Rahul Gandhi and AICC general secretary organisation K C Venugopal participated in a review meeting with state unit chiefs, Congress Legislature Party leaders and secretaries of 12 states and Union territories where the SIR is underway.
"We held a comprehensive strategy review with AICC general secretaries, AICC in-charges, PCCs, CLPs, and AICC secretaries from the states/UTs where the SIR process is underway. The Congress Party is unequivocally committed to safeguarding the integrity of the electoral rolls," Kharge said on X after he chaired the meeting.
At a time when public confidence in democratic institutions is already strained, the Election Commission’s conduct during the SIR process has been "deeply disappointing", he said.
"It must immediately demonstrate that it is not operating under the BJP’s shadow and it remembers its Constitutional oath and allegiance to the people of India, not to any ruling party," Kharge said.
"We firmly believe that the BJP is attempting to weaponise the SIR process for vote chori. And if the EC chooses to look the other way, that failure is not just administrative - it becomes a complicity of silence," the Congress chief said.
"Our workers, BLOs, and District/City/Block Presidents will therefore remain relentlessly vigilant. We will expose every attempt, however subtle, to delete genuine voters or insert bogus ones," Kharge said.
The Congress will not allow democratic safeguards to be eroded by partisan misuse of institutions, he asserted.
After facing a severe drubbing in Bihar, where the NDA cruised to victory with 202 seats against the Mahagathbandhan's 35, the Congress has questioned the role of the Election Commission (EC) in the poll process.
The EC on Monday said more than 50 crore of the nearly 51 crore electors in the nine states and three UTs have received enumeration forms under the ongoing SIR of voter list.
In its daily SIR bulletin, the poll authority said 50.11 crore enumeration forms have been distributed in the 12 states and UTs. In other words, 98.32 per cent of the 50.99 crore electors have received the partly filled forms.
The states and UTs are: Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep.
Among these, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala, and West Bengal will go to the polls in 2026.
In Assam, where elections are also due in 2026, the EC announced a 'special revision' of electoral rolls on Monday.
Phase-II of the SIR exercise began on November 4 with the enumeration stage and will continue till December 4.
Last week, Rahul Gandhi called the Bihar poll results surprising, and claimed that the election was not fair from the very beginning.
Gandhi also said the Congress and the INDIA bloc would conduct an in-depth review of the outcomes.
The Congress also claimed that the results, without a doubt, reflect "vote chori on a gigantic scale - masterminded by the prime minister, the home minister, the EC".
Gandhi's poll campaign against the BJP in Bihar revolved around his "vote chori"(vote theft) allegations.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
