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Mamata Banerjee continued to defy the orders of the Election Commission over the transfer of eight West Bengal officials including five district police chiefs and one district magistrate.
Despite the EC setting a 2:30 pm deadline for the transfer of the officials, the state government in a letter expressed its inability to carry out the orders.
In the letter, which chief secretary Sanjay Mitra said was written in accordance with the “chief minister's direction”, the state government has appealed to the EC to reconsider its decision on the transfer orders.
Government sources suggested that the EC consults the state government and seeks three names for each replacement. However, in yesterday's order EC went ahead with the transfer order without any consultations. Besides pointing this out, the letter also includes a list of IAS/IPS officers from which the EC could choose as replacements.
"For example, for Malda SP is replaced by an officer who is a 2009-batch IPS but the DSP there is from the 2008-IPS batch. How can the state government let this happen? The EC has the right to transfer, but had they consulted us, these issue could have been avoided," a government official said.
West Bengal Chief Minister had yesterday taken a defiant stand, saying she would "not remove a single officer" and "was ready to face the consequences."
In today's letter to the EC, the state government toned down indicating the state was ready to accept the transfers, but not the replacements. The ball seems to be in the EC's court now.
The state may have a point in the fact the the normal procedure for finalising replacements was not followed, though constitutional experts are saying that the EC is well within its right to issue the order.
"It is upto the EC, what it will do. It may postpone the poll. It may even approach the President or the Supreme Court," constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap said.
Meanwhile, the West Bengal government too is getting ready for a possible confrontation and has sought legal opinion from the Advocate General on the issue.
