Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday criticised the appointment of former Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal as West Bengal’s new chief secretary and Subrata Gupta as adviser to Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, alleging collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission.
The Congress has claimed that the appointments reflected the "brazen collusion and connivance" between the Election Commission and the BJP.
In a post on X written in Hindi, Gandhi said, “In the BJP-EC’s ‘chor bazaar’, the bigger the theft, the bigger the reward.”
The opposition party had on Monday said that there is not even an attempt to keep the collusion discrete or concealed.
Congress general secretary in charge of communications, Jairam Ramesh, had said the BJP-led West Bengal government has appointed the erstwhile chief election officer Agarwal, a 1990-batch IAS officer responsible for overseeing the recent Assembly elections in the state, as the new chief secretary.
Similarly, Gupta, also a 1990-batch IAS officer who oversaw the SIR deletions in Bengal as the special roll observer, has been appointed the chief advisor to the Chief Minister, Ramesh pointed out.
"These appointments reflect the brazen collusion and connivance between the ECI and the BJP. There is no longer even an attempt to keep the collusion discrete or concealed," Ramesh said.
The appointments are a testimony that the ECI was not impartial and acted exclusively to benefit the BJP, he alleged.
An entire state went to the election with 27 lakh people being debarred from voting.
This was tactfully executed by the ECI to create an electoral advantage for the BJP, Ramesh said.
Agarwal, a West Bengal cadre officer, helmed the EC-mandated Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bengal in the run-up to the Assembly polls, in which around 91 lakh voters were removed from the voter list.
The West Bengal government on Sunday carried out a bureaucratic reshuffle, appointing two IAS officers and seven WBCS (executive) officers in the chief minister's office (CMO), according to official notifications.
Gupta was appointed advisor to the chief minister, hours after he was sworn in, while Shantanu Bala was named his private secretary.
(With inputs from PTI)