With the preliminary ‘final’ electoral roll out on Saturday, all eyes are set on two high-profile Assembly seats in Bengal politics — Mamata Banerjee’s Bhabanipur and Suvendu Adhikari’s Nandigram.
Although the two Assembly constituencies are among the 294 seats in Bengal and are located around 130 km apart, they have remained high-voltage Trinamool-BJP battlegrounds, especially since Mamata contested from both seats in the 2021 Assembly polls.
Mamata contested first from Nandigram, where Adhikari, her lieutenant-turned-arch-rival, defeated her. Later, Mamata won in a bypoll from Bhabanipur.
Besides providing statewide data, the Election Commission on Saturday also published detailed lists of voters added and deleted, along with the status of the poll roll for each of the 294 Assembly constituencies in Bengal.
While Mamata’s Bhabanipur constituency saw a reduction of 2,324 voters on Saturday compared to the draft roll, Adhikari’s Nandigram recorded an increase of 770 voters.
Election Commission data show that in the draft electoral roll published on December 16, Bhabanipur had 1,61,525 voters. As of February 28, the constituency has 1,59,201 voters. A total of 2,342 voters were deleted and 18 names were added.
In contrast, Nandigram had a total of 2,67,608 voters in the draft roll. According to Saturday’s figures, Adhikari’s constituency now has 2,68,378 voters.
A total of 397 names were deleted from the draft roll in Nandigram, while 1,167 new names were added, resulting in a net increase of 770.
Adhikari, who switched from Trinamool to the BJP in December 2020, had defeated Mamata in Nandigram in the 2021 Assembly elections by a narrow margin of around 2,000 votes.
The contrast in numbers was particularly significant in terms of deletions under the ASDD (absentee, shifted, dead and duplicate) category. In Bhabanipur, around 44,000 names were deleted under this category in the draft roll published on December 16. In Nandigram, only 10,599 names were deleted under the same category.
Apart from these deletions, around 14,000 names in Bhabanipur and 9,000 names in Nandigram are currently under adjudication.
Adhikari claimed that there would be no voters left who could ensure Mamata’s victory in Bhabanipur.
“In the first round, 45,000 voters were deleted, and 14,514 voters are pending adjudication. So, there will be no voters left to make her (Mamata) win from Bhabanipur,” the BJP leader said on Saturday.
Trinamool leader Kunal Ghosh, however, said there would be no impact at all in Bhabanipur after this SIR.
“The BJP has no reason to rejoice over these SIR reports. It is natural that after a long time, when an SIR is conducted, those who have died or shifted will be deleted. The constituency (Bhabanipur) for which the BJP is celebrating — check the total number of voters and the number of votes cast in earlier polls — that will make the picture clear,” said Ghosh.