CEC arrives in Bihar with his team to review poll preparations

Patna: Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar arrived in the Bihar capital late on Friday for reviewing, over the next couple of days, preparations for the high-octane assembly polls, which are expected to be announced soon, an official said.

The CEC was accompanied by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi and they are scheduled to hold talks with representatives of various registered political parties on Saturday.

This would be followed by a meeting with police and administrative officials across all districts of the state for a review of the law and order situation and other requirements for the smooth conduct of the polls.

Later in the day, the EC will hold discussions with the state’s Chief Secretary, Director General of Police and other top officials.

Notably, the visit comes days after the EC published its final electoral roll, prepared as part of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) carried out over a period of three months.

The ruling NDA has been asserting that the SIR was very much required to “remove” impurities from the voters’ list, into which even “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingyas from Myanmar” have allegedly found their way.

“The EC is most welcome in Bihar. May all political parties extend full cooperation in the grand festival of democracy (loktantra ka mahaparv) that the assembly elections are going to be,” senior BJP leader Vijay Kumar Sinha said.

However, the INDIA bloc, of which many constituents have challenged the exercise in the Supreme Court, has claimed that SIR was an attempt at “vote theft” to “help” the BJP-led coalition.

Senior Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar said, “The names of many persons have been deleted during SIR. It is the EC’s duty to ensure that there has been no wrongful deletion.”

CPI(ML) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, who is also one of the petitioners before the Supreme Court, said, “Tomorrow, we will flag before the EC the various discrepancies in the electoral roll that have come to our notice. There seems to be a disproportionate deletion of the names of female voters. It is also not known how many foreign nationals the EC actually found during SIR.”