KOLKATA: With just months to go to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, more than 50 per cent of the newly eligible electorates in West Bengal are “not interested” in exercising their electoral rights and voting for a party.
A survey conducted by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, revealed when the state’s 15 lakh youths are presently eligible to exercise their franchise in the upcoming elections, only around 7 lakh of them enrolled themselves in the list of voters.
During the survey, the booth-level officers (BLO) came across scores of new voters who were not interested in participating in the next year’s general elections.
“Most of them showed no interest saying they will enrol their names in the voters’ list before the next electoral exercise as there are four chances a year to get enrolled in the list of eligible electorates,” said a BLO.
The BLOs were surveyed by visiting door-to-door. “When we asked the eligible first-time voters for the reason for enrolling their names in the voters’ list, most of them said they would do it in the next phase of the process,” said the officer.
The CEO, Aariz Aftab, expressed his concern over the reluctance of first-time voters in a meeting with the officials of his department.
In the 2019 general elections, West Bengal had the maximum number of first-time electorates who had enlisted themselves in the voters’ list followed by Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
According to Election Commission data, 20.1 lakh first-time voters enlisted their names in the list of eligible electorates when the figure was 16.7 lakh and 13.6 lakh in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh respectively.
In an internal survey conducted by the BJP’s Bengal chapter, the saffron came to know it had enjoyed massive support by the young voters in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections which took the party’s tally to 18 from two in the lower House of Parliament.
“New voters’ reluctance to enrol themselves in the voters’ list is not a good sign for us. In the previous general elections, they supported our party’s nationalism narrative before the election which was followed by the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent action by Indian Airforce in Pakistan’s Balakot,” said a BJO leader in Kolkata.
Number of applications for enrolment in voters’ list by new eligible voters received by some of the densely populated districts:
South 24 Parganas: 58,000+
North 24 Parganas: 77,000+
Murshidabad: 54,000+
East Midnapore: 59,000+
West Midnapore: 46,000+
Nadia: 46,000+
Total voters in West Bengal: 7.27 crore+