The Trinamul Congress is gearing up to carry out Mamata Banerjee’s orders to raise hell over the “EPIC scam” in Delhi from Monday when Parliament reconvenes for the budget session’s second half, to ensure unwavering national focus on what is now her foremost poll plank for 2026.

Sources in the senior leadership said the Trinamul parliamentary party was confident of support in this endeavour from several major players in the national Opposition space, such as the Congress, the DMK, the SS-UBT, the RJD and the SP.

Trinamul has 42 MPs in the two Houses (third-largest after the BJP and the Congress).

“Every instrument available in Parliament will be put to use to let it be known that the BJP, with the blessings of the Election Commission, has been manipulating electoral rolls in unfavourable states to secure undue wins,” said a Trinamool insider, reiterating the Bengal chief minister’s allegation.

On February 27, Mamata had directly accused the EC of aiding the BJP in manipulating the electoral roll. She said the Elector’s Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) of several people in Bengal matched those of voters in other states.

“Our supreme leader caught them and made a public declaration, now we will take it forward with every necessary follow-up. The exercises inside and outside the two Houses of Parliament will be part of that,” said the insider, adding that MPs such as Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Derek O’Brien, Sagarika Ghose and Kirti Azad had already filed notices with the Parliament secretariat seeking discussions on the matter.

A senior Trinamul leader said there had been backchannel parleys with others in
the national Opposition space and multiple key players, especially from the poll-bound states had echoed Mamata’s concerns.

“RJD in Bihar, DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Congress in Assam, for instance, have all been worried about this, more so since she (Mamata) explained how this was done to achieve BJP victories in Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi,” he said.

Mamata had also directed Trinamool state president Subrata Bakshi to head a 36-member committee for the physical verification of the electoral roll.

The committee held its first assessment meeting on Thursday at Trinamool Bhavan, but even that exercise was somewhat vitiated by the unceasing wrangling between the purported new and old guards in the party. TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, the face of the putative new guard, was conspicuously absent from the meeting dominated by the old guard.

Although Abhishek said there would be a follow-up meeting on March 15, other complications cropped up.

“Bakshida was expected to make a grand announcement of the March 15 meeting for the attendees, but it came as a mere passing mention at the fag end, when many of them had already gone out,” said a senior in the party who claims equidistance from both ginger groups.

“Also, the formation of the sub-committees by Bakshida at the district level had no approval from Mamata and had no balance of the old and the new. That is why late on Thursday, she pressed the pause button on that measure,” he added. “At a time she is going out of her way to help reconcile all differences so that we all go into battle as a unit, an impregnable phalanx, this did not look good.”