In a never-before-seen spectacle on Monday afternoon, hundreds of booth-level officers, many still wearing their official identity cards, swarmed the Chief Electoral Officer’s office in central Kolkata and attempted to physically breach police barricades, screaming in rage over back-breaking workloads, a paltry ₹1,000 monthly honorarium, and a series of deaths that have turned the Special Intensive Revision drive into what protesters called a “blood-soaked voter cleansing exercise.”

The protest, spearheaded by the BLO Adhikar Raksha Committee, erupted into pandemonium just minutes before Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari arrived with a BJP delegation, triggering a chaotic clash of slogans as officers accused both the Trinamool Congress government and the Election Commission of treating them as disposable labour while BJP workers shouted that Mamata Banerjee’s administration had abandoned the very grassroots officials implementing the Centre-backed revision.

Television footage captured distraught BLOs, mostly school teachers and government employees juggling full-time jobs, pushing against riot-gear police, some climbing barricades and others breaking down in tears as they narrated how they are forced to verify thousands of voters across distant localities without transport, leave, or medical support, conditions that have already driven colleagues in Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Bengal itself to suicide or cardiac arrest.

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Emerging from his meeting inside the fortified building, an unfazed Suvendu Adhikari launched a blistering attack on the Trinamool Congress for opposing the revision exercise in public while refusing to release proper honorarium or logistical support to the officers, while state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya threw down a direct challenge to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to visit Bengal immediately and witness the “graveyard shift” conditions under which BLOs are collapsing.

As viral videos of dying teachers recording tearful apologies to their families continue to haunt social media and reports of fresh stress-related deaths surface almost daily, the Kolkata storming has transformed into a national flashpoint, exposing the brutal human price of India’s aggressive voter-list purification drive and threatening to snowball into the biggest electoral staff rebellion on the eve of crucial Assembly polls.

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