Trinamool Congress national general secretary and MP Abhishek Banerjee on Tuesday took up the task to try and make a dent in the BJP’s support base in Cooch Behar with a three-fold strategy.

Abhishek walked on the dais with 10 voters marked “dead” and deleted from the draft electoral roll published last month. He sharply questioned the performance of the legislators of the saffron camp elected from the district. And third, he accused the BJP of propagating an "anti-Bengali" narrative.

“Let me present these people before you.... Can you see them?” asked Abhishek, accompanied by 10 persons, including elderly women, as he strode on the ramp with them on the stage set up in Kadamtala, a locality on the outskirts of Cooch Behar town.

“These people were born in Cooch Behar, have worked and lived here. Yet, the Election Commission has deleted their names and has marked them as dead voters. This is a blatant attempt to remove names of genuine voters from the electoral roll (as a part of the ongoing SIR). We will not let it happen, and our party will stand in their support,” said chief minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew.

A section of the crowd at the public meeting addressed by Abhishek Banerjee in Cooch Behar on Tuesday

For the past few years, Abhishek has been steadfastly focusing on Cooch Behar, especially after the 2021 Assembly elections, when the BJP bagged seven of nine Assembly seats in the district while Trinamool won only in two seats. Later, the party bagged the Dinhata seat in a by-poll, thus reducing the BJP’s district tally to six.

“The party's efforts showed results in 2024, when Trinamool could wrest the Cooch Behar Lok Sabha seat from the BJP. The BJP's Nisith Pramanik, who was even a junior minister in the Union home ministry, had to bite the dust as Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia, the Trinamool candidate, secured a win,” said a political observer.

“This time, Trinamool wants to secure the district's Assembly seats, and thus, prominent party leaders like Abhishek Banerjee are putting in all efforts in Cooch Behar and in north Bengal as a whole,” he added.

In 2021, the BJP had won 30 of 54 Assembly seats in north Bengal while Trinamool had won 23 seats.

While speaking at the meeting, Abhishek alleged the BJP was “anti-Bengali”.

“Himanta Biswa Sarma, the chief minister of (BJP-ruled) Assam, is saying that Bengali-speaking people should be put behind bars. His government had even sent notices to some residents of Cooch Behar to prove their citizenship. I would ask him not to mess with us,” he said.

“In many cases, people from Bengal have been wrongly arrested in the BJP-ruled states (as infiltrators), and some were even pushed into Bangladesh. Our party is constantly fighting against such wrongs,” Abhishek added.

Abhishek also questioned the role of the BJP legislators in Cooch Behar.

“The BJP did not keep its promise, be it the formation of the Narayani battalion or the construction of a sports hub. Even the sole flight service from here to Calcutta will close down on January 31. The BJP MPs and MLAs who were elected from Bengal are sitting idle,” he alleged.

Abhishek’s allegation that the EC has marked genuine voters as dead prompted BJP leaders to react.

“The basic work of the special intensive revision (SIR) is being done by the booth-level officers (BLOs). I challenge Abhishek Banerjee to publish the list of such BLOs in whose booths voters who are alive have been marked dead. It seems to be a planned conspiracy by these BLOs, who seem to be inclined towards Trinamool, to disrupt the SIR process,” Shankar Ghosh, the BJP MLA of Siliguri and party’s chief whip in the Assembly, said.