Kolkata: Four-time Congress MP Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury on Monday filed a PIL in the Calcutta High Court with a five-point demand for the forthcoming panchayat elections in West Bengal seeking deployment of central armed forces personnel for the rural civic body polls.
The PIL was filed at the division bench of Calcutta High Court’s Chief Justice Prakash Srivastava and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj. The matter is likely to come up for hearing on March 10.
It is the learnt that the five-point demand as mentioned in the PIL includes introduction of online nomination system for the candidates, ensuring safety and security of the candidates since the day of nomination, videography of the entire election process, six-phase rural civic body polls and deployment of central armed forces during polling and counting.
Although the dates for the panchayat polls are yet to be announced by the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC), the opposition parties in the state including BJP, Left Front and Congress have been accusing the ruling Trinamool Congress of already unleashing violence in the rural pockets of the state to terrorise the opposition and the voters well in advance.
Earlier, the leader of opposition in West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, too had filed a similar PIL at the same division bench demanding deployment of central armed forces for the panchayat polls.
Choudhury made his entry in the Lok Sabha in the bypolls for the erstwhile and pre-delimitation Malda Lok Sabha constituency in 2006, following the death of his elder brother and long-time MP from that constituency, ABA Ghani Khan Choudhury.
Later, following delimitation, the Malda constituency got divided into two Lok Sabha constituencies namely Malda (South) and Madla (North).
In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury successfully contested from Malda (South). He got re-elected from the same constituency twice — in 2014 and 2019.
–IANS
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