With two weeks to go for elections in West Bengal, a meeting on Wednesday between the state’s ruling party TMC and the Election Commission (EC) in the national capital witnessed high drama. While the TMC claimed that Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar asked its delegation to “get lost”, the EC asserted that it engaged in “straight talk” and conveyed that the Assembly polls would be free of “fear, violence, intimidation and inducement”.
After the meeting, TMC Parliamentary Leader in the Rajya Sabha, Derek O’Brien, who was part of the delegation, said: “I want to tell you what the CEC told our delegation. Within seven minutes of the meeting, he told us to ‘get lost’. After being told so, we left. We are the second-largest Opposition party in Parliament, yet this is the conduct we are met with.”
EC sources, on the other hand, claimed that O’Brien “shouted at the Election Commission and asked the CEC not to speak”. “The CEC requested Derek O’brien to maintain the decorum of the Commission room. Shouting and indecent behaviour is not appropriate,” the EC sources said.
The EC also posted on X a rare statement by the panel targeting a political party. “ECI’s Straight-talk to Trinamool Congress… This time, the Elections in West Bengal would surely be: fear-free, violence-free, intimidation-free, inducement-free and without any raid, booth jamming and source jamming,” the EC posted.
The meeting comes two days after the Lok Sabha Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairman rejected TMC-initiated impeachment motions submitted in both Houses with Opposition support for the removal of CEC Kumar.
The TMC has been at loggerheads with EC, questioning the conduct and functioning of the poll body, accusing it of favouring the BJP, especially in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls and mass transfer of top officials. In the past, the party has accused the EC of operating as an extended arm of the Central Government.
During Wednesday’s meeting, O’Brien said, the delegation “showed nine letters that the TMC Chairperson Mamata Banerjee had written to the EC, with no acknowledgement or reply from their side”.
“We also said that if it had been (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi or (Home Minister) Amit Shah writing those letters, the CEC would have definitely responded,” said O’Brien, while speaking to reporters along with other members of the delegation, Rajya Sabha MPs Sagarika Ghose and Menaka Guruswamy, and ex-MP Saket Gokhale.
“We gave them a list of six examples of officers appointed in Bengal who have obvious, proven links to the BJP. We provided photographic evidence along with the list. These officers are being made part of the election process. We asked that these officers be transferred. We also gave the example of the CEO, who was seen with BJP workers in Nandigram,” O’Brien said.
“It took us just 2-3 minutes to present these examples and the memorandum… Then we told the CEC that since such tainted officers are being appointed in Bengal, how can this ensure the conduct of free and fair elections? To this, his answer was ‘Get lost’,” he said.
O’Brien said the delegation told the CEC that “we would not listen to him because he does not allow any of his fellow officials to speak”.
“While we were walking out, one of our colleagues congratulated him on being the first CEC in the history of India to have notices of removal against him in both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha,” O’Brien said before describing the CEC as “a thief” and “a criminal”. He also challenged the EC to release video footage or audio recording of the meeting.
Responding to the EC’s post on X, O ‘Brien said: “None of what the CEC has said to the media is true, he did not say anything that he claims he did. Unless, of course, he was talking to himself.”
Speaking to The Indian Express about the EC’s post, MP Sagarika Ghose called the EC’s claims “false” and “blatant lies”. “None of what the EC has put up on social media was said to the four-member delegation. Only two lines were said to us by the CEC. The first line was ‘where is your authorised signatory’ and the second was ‘get lost’,” said Ghose.
SP president Akhilesh Yadav and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal were among leaders from other Opposition parties who reacted sharply to the EC’s post.
Akhilesh said if the ECI is “removed, everything else will fall into place on its own”. Kejriwal said now there was “no need to even say that the Election Commission is working under BJP and taking direct instructions from BJP”. “This is now out in the open and extremely unfortunate. At the very least, by tweeting in such language, don’t publicly tarnish the reputation of such an important institution,” Kejriwal posted on X, replying to the EC’s post.
In August last year, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had accused the EC of “vote chori” in poll-bound Bihar. At the time, CEC Kumar had asked the Congress leader to either submit his allegations in a sworn affidavit within seven days or apologise to the nation.
Kumar had also termed allegations of discrepancies in electoral rolls as “misinformation”, saying there was no evidence. “A lie, if repeated several times, does not become a truth,” Kumar had said.
O’ Brien also challenged ECI to release the video footage or audio recording of the meeting. (Asad Rehman) 
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