Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday accused the BJP and the Election Commission of conspiring to orchestrate her defeat in Bhabanipur, alleging a calculated blueprint for false voting that central forces would enforce in three specific Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards.
“On the day of the election, mind you, three wards have been chosen: 74, 77, and 63. They will rig the elections in those three using central forces,” said the chief minister at a rally in Barrackpore.
The wards 74 (Alipore), 77 (parts of Kidderpore) and 63 (parts of Chowringhee, Taltala, Park Street, Shakespeare Sarani, the Maidan, and Hastings) are among the eight that the Assembly seat comprises.
Of the three, the Trinamool Congress led in 77 — besides 73 (parts of Bhowanipore, Patuapara, and Kalighat) and 82 (Chetla) — in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. The BJP led in 74 and 63, along with 70 (Jadu Babu’s Bazaar), 71 (Bhowanipore) and 72 (Chakraberia, Padmapukur, and Bakulbagan).
“They don’t know me. Wherever they create a ruckus, I will appear. Stop me if you can. Ban me, will you? If you ban me, I will be seen all over the world. I will start a satyagraha at home. There will be commotion all over the country,” she added, hours before her car stopped at Collin Street on the way home in the evening. There, she got out and chatted for a while with the people at a tea shop on the intersection.
Mamata had mounted a scathing offensive on the commission earlier in the day because the returning officer of Bhabanipur had denied her permission for a campaign event.
On Monday, the Trinamool chairperson conducted a door-to-door outreach exercise in the Shakespeare Sarani area. On Sunday, she held a meeting with residents at Ladies’ Park, signalling that she has now also started focusing on the campaign on her home turf ahead of April 29, having solely focused on spearheading the party’s campaign statewide for weeks.
Maintaining that the EC-controlled administrative apparatus functioned solely to facilitate the exclusion of her support base ahead of the April 29 polls, the chief minister suggested the upcoming election represented not merely her contest for a seat — against her former protege and current bete noire, the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari — but a battle against a system she alleges is systematically rigged to narrow her political footprint statewide.
“We will also keep people around. Those who are thinking of doing a cover-up, if you have 50 cameras, the moon, the sun, the planets, the stars... are our cameras. We will keep an eye on everything,” she said at Haldia.
Her volatility masks a deep anxiety rooted in raw electoral mathematics. Mamata’s comfortable margin of 58,832 votes in the September 2021 bypoll, where she secured 72 per cent of the vote share, evaporated with startling speed. By the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the Trinamool lead in the Bhabanipur segment had plummeted to a mere 8,297 votes.
The BJP led in 149 of the 269 booths.
Then came the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) by Nirvachan Sadan.
Bhabanipur had 2,06,925 voters in December 2025. The list of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate voters published by the poll panel on December 16, removed around 44,000 names in Bhabanipur. The February 28 list had 14,113 names under adjudication, and 3,875 of those names were deleted.
Data from the Sabar Institute had shown a disproportionate removal of Muslims.
Nearly one out of every two Bhabanipur electors is a non-Bengali. The socio-economically diverse constituency has around 80 per cent non-Muslim votes, with Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains in large numbers.
Junior Union minister Sukanta Majumdar retorted that Mamata’s rhetoric signalled a fear of defeat.
“She is afraid of defeat. She understands that the ground is moving away from under her feet day after day.... I am forced to say that her mind is out of joint. After the election campaign is over, she should take good rest and see a doctor,” claimed Majumdar.
