Mamata accuses BJP of voter list manipulation

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday echoed the Congress in alleging that the BJP, with the backing of the Election Commission (EC), was manipulating voter rolls ahead of next year’s Assembly elections.“The BJP is tampering with the voter list with the blessings of the Election Commission. This has been exposed. It is your responsibility to stop fake voters from being included,” Banerjee told Trinamool Congress leaders and functionaries at Kolkata’s Netaji Indoor Stadium.

Her remarks come after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi recently accused the BJP of large-scale additions and deletions in Maharashtra’s voter list before the 2024 Assembly elections.

Banerjee alleged that the BJP was attempting to flood Bengal’s voter rolls with outsiders to gain electoral advantage. “If they succeed, it will be the end of Bengal’s culture. We respect guests, but we won’t allow outsiders to take over. This is not Delhi or Maharashtra,” she declared.

The TMC chief claimed that the alleged voter list tampering was focused on constituencies where the BJP had lost by narrow margins in the 2021 Assembly elections. She cited examples from South Dinajpur’s Gangarampur and Murshidabad’s Raninagar, where old voters were allegedly being replaced by new ones using the same photo identity card number.

Reading from a list, she highlighted cases such as Mohammad Shahidul Islam from Raninagar, whose EPIC number was allegedly reassigned to Sonia Devi from Haryana and Mohammad Ali Hussain of Raninagar, who now shares an ID with Manjeet from Haryana.

“Are the elections happening in Haryana or Bengal?” Banerjee asked, accusing the BJP of using these voters to cast ballots in early-phase elections in Murshidabad before moving them to North and South 24 Parganas.

She further claimed that two agencies — Association of Billion Minds and India 360 — had been hired by the BJP to enroll voters from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana through online voter registration. “This is how they won in Maharashtra and Delhi. Others failed to catch it, but we have,” she said.

To counter this, Banerjee announced that a committee, led by TMC state president Subrata Bakshi, would conduct a block-wise review of West Bengal’s voter list to identify and prevent fraudulent entries.