Will move court again on voter deletions: Mamata

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday hit out at the BJP and the Election Commission of India (ECI) over voter deletions during the SIR exercise and said her party will move a court again to resist the removal of electors from the rolls.

Her comments came after nearly 91 lakh voters’ names were deleted from the electoral rolls following the completion of the Special Intensive Revision in the State.

“You will not be able to defeat the TMC by deleting names. We will move a court again to resist the exclusion of names,” Banerjee said while attacking her principal challenger, the BJP, over the roll revision exercise.

Banerjee had in February argued in the Supreme Court as she sought an intervention in the SIR process.

The ECI figures showed the total deletion of over 90.83 lakh names from the original voter base of 7.66 crore in October 2025.

Criticising the poll panel over the SIR process, the TMC supremo said, “We will fight legally to get the names included on the list as per the Constitution. If people cannot cast their votes, what is the need to frame the tribunal? And then you are saying that the list has been frozen. What is this? We will challenge it and try to understand it.”

Addressing a poll rally at Arambagh in Hooghly district, the TMC supremo accused the saffron party of trying to manipulate the electoral rolls and offering money to woo voters.

Banerjee also charged the Election Commission with intimidating people over the phone. “It (ECI) is working at the behest of the BJP. It is calling people over the telephone to threaten and intimidate them,” she claimed.

Later, while speaking at a rally in Balagarh in the same district, Banerjee warned that voting for the BJP would effectively mean “giving up fish, meat, and speaking in Bengali”.

“People are not allowed to eat eggs, fish, or meat in the BJP-ruled States like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. The same will happen here if the BJP comes to power,” Banerjee claimed.

Addressing another rally in Sreerampore, the TMC supremo alleged that the BJP was planning to divide Bengal in the garb of delimitation.

“The BJP has targeted Bengal. It is conspiring to divide the State again. In the name of delimitation, you are planning to carve out another State from Bengal,” she said.

Mamata BANERJEE FILES nomination for Bhabanipur seat

Kolkata: Turning her nomination filing for the Bhabanipur seat into a political counteroffensive to the BJP’s call for “paribartan “, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday marched from her Kalighat residence to submit her papers, projecting the constituency as a “mini-India” under siege of polarisation.

Amid slogans of ‘Mamata Banerjee zindabad ‘, ‘Joy Bangla’ and ‘TMC zindabad ‘, Banerjee led a colourful procession to the Alipore Survey Building, where she filed her nomination papers for the constituency that revived her electoral career in 2021. With folded hands and her trademark smile, Banerjee walked nearly 600 metres with women supporters blowing conch shells and raising ululations and party workers waving Trinamool Congress flags. If BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari’s nomination filing last week, accompanied by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, was designed as a show of saffron strength and a call for “paribartan”, Banerjee’s roadshow on Wednesday was carefully choreographed as its ideological opposite.

“I was born and brought up here in Bhabanipur only. I stay here 365 days a year. My life, my work, my movements everything revolves around Bhabanipur. Everything in my life began from here. I thank and salute the people of Bhabanipur,” Banerjee said after filing her nomination papers. Seeking to widen the contest beyond Bhabanipur, Banerjee appealed to electors across Bengal to vote for the TMC. “I appeal to the people not only in Bhabanipur but in all the 294 seats to ensure the victory of our candidates. We will win with a bigger mandate,” she said. The TMC had won 213 of the 294 seats in the 2021 assembly polls. But the sharpest political message of the day came through the issue of voter roll revision. Banerjee alleged that large-scale deletions under the SIR had hit Muslims and women disproportionately and said the TMC would again move a court against the freezing of electoral rolls.

“I am really pained that so many names have been deleted from the electoral rolls,” she said.

The TMC supremo also said, “I moved the Supreme Court and 32 lakh names, out of 1.2 crore, have been restored. Those who are in the adjudication list should also be restored. I fail to understand why the voter rolls have been frozen. We will again move a court.”

The TMC believes the SIR has disproportionately affected Muslims and women -- two of Banerjee’s strongest social constituencies -- and is trying to recast the election narrative from corruption, lack of jobs and anti-incumbency to one centred on identity, citizenship and deleted names.

That is particularly significant in Bhabanipur, where nearly 47,000 names have reportedly been deleted from the rolls, and another 14,000 were kept under adjudication.

More than 56 per cent of those whose names are under adjudication are Muslims, though the community forms only around 24 per cent of the electorate.

The TMC sought to project Bhabanipur as a “mini India” -- a constituency where Bengali Hindus, Gujarati and Marwari traders, Punjabi families, Jains and Muslims have coexisted for decades.

The message was visible even in the proposers to Banerjee’s nomination papers -- Rubi Hakim, wife of Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim; businessman Nispal Singh Rane, TMC leader Bablu Singh; and Miraj Shah of the Bhabanipur Education Society.

Spread across eight Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards, Bhabanipur has long been one of the State’s most socially diverse constituencies.

Roughly 42 per cent of its electorate are Bengali Hindus, 34 per cent non-Bengali Hindus and around 24 per cent Muslims.

The BJP, however, believes the constituency is no longer the fortress it once was for Banerjee.

Though the TMC won Bhabanipur by nearly 29,000 votes in 2021 and Banerjee later increased that margin to more than 58,000 in the bypoll after her defeat in Nandigram, the party’s lead in the Bhabanipur assembly segment shrank to just 8,297 votes in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The BJP also finished ahead in five of the constituency’s eight KMC wards -- 63, 70, 71, 72 and 74.

That has encouraged the saffron camp to field Adhikari, the former TMC strongman who defeated Banerjee in Nandigram in 2021 and has since become her fiercest rival.

“Normally, we would have to win 170 seats. But if Suvendu Babu defeats Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur, ‘paribartan’ will come automatically,” Amit Shah had said while accompanying Adhikari during his nomination filing.

For Banerjee, therefore, Wednesday’s march from Kalighat to Alipore was not merely the filing of a nomination paper.

It was an attempt to turn Bhabanipur into the symbolic battlefield of Bengal’s 2026 election -- a contest between the BJP’s politics of change and identity and the TMC’s appeal to pluralism, belonging and grievance over voter deletions.