The Trinamool Congress on Friday approached the Calcutta High Court challenging the transfer of several IAS and IPS officers in West Bengal by the Election Commission of India after the assembly elections were announced.The petition filed by TMC leader and lawyer Kalyan Banerjee names Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar as a respondent.
The plea challenged the EC’s decision to transfer officials without consulting the state government. The matter is likely to be heard early next week.Within hours of announcing the parliamentary elections on March 15, the Election Commission mobilized a large number of senior officials, including the chief secretary, home secretary and police chief.chief minister of west bengal Mamata Banerjee criticized the move on Thursday, calling it an “undeclared emergency” and a “deliberate design to wrest control of Bangladesh through coercion and institutional manipulation.” “What we are witnessing is entirely an undeclared emergency driven by political hatred rather than democratic principles,” she said.Banerjee later wrote to EC Kumar urging the EC not to take such “arbitrary, unilateral and biased” action. “The Election Commission has crossed all boundaries of decency and constitutional propriety. Since the beginning of the so-called special intensive revision, the Election Commission has acted with clear bias and little regard for the ground realities or the welfare of the people,” the Chief Minister wrote.The Election Commission on Thursday suspended the inter-state transfer orders of some senior police officers. Bidhannagar CP Murlidhar Sharma and Siliguri CP Syed Waquar Raza were earlier asked to move to Tamil Nadu but have been told to wait. The transfer orders of Barrackpore CP Praveen Tripathi and Howrah CP Akash Magharia to Tamil Nadu and Birbhum SP Amandeep to Karnataka have also been put on hold.The 294-member West Bengal Assembly elections will be held in two phases on April 23 and 29, with counting of votes scheduled for May 4.
