West Bengal polls: Mamata vows to help disenfranchised voters move tribunals, TMC set 60000 margin target for CM in Bhabanipur

Kolkata: As the Election Commission is set to publish a supplementary electoral roll for poll-bound West Bengal on Monday, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that her Trinamool Congress would help disenfranchised people appeal before the 19 tribunals that the poll panel recently set up following an order from the Supreme Court.

The TMC supremo on Sunday addressed her party’s workers in the Bhabanipur assembly constituency in Kolkata. The Bharatiya Janata Party has fielded Suvendhu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the outgoing state assembly, against the chief minister in what was hitherto considered a stronghold of the TMC.

Mamata’s nephew and the TMC national general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, set the target for the party workers in the constituency to ensure the chief minister’s victory with a greater margin than the last bye-elections, which she had won in 2021.

Bhabanipur must set a record of margins among all constituencies in Kolkata, and Mamata Banerjee has to win from here by at least 60,000 votes, a source quoted Abhishek as saying at the closed-door meeting of the party workers in the constituency. He said that the TMC chief had won in 231 of the 287 polling booths in 2021 and, this time, the party workers would have to ensure her victory in at least 232 booths.

The chief minister hit out at the Election Commission for changing nearly 50 administrative and police officers of the state over the past few days since the declaration of the schedule of the assembly polls. She also criticised the commission for harassing the people of the state and disenfranchising a large number of genuine voters in the name of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal, allegedly to ensure electoral advantage for the BJP.

As many as 63.66 lakh voters – around 8.3% of the electorate – have been struck off from the electoral rolls since the special revision of the lists was launched in November 2025, bringing down the size of the electorate from about 7.66 crore to over 7.04 crore. Besides, more than 60.06 lakh voters have been placed in the “under adjudication” category. Their eligibility to vote is now being determined through legal scrutiny by the judicial officers, under the monitoring of the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court.

The judicial officers, according to the sources, have completed deciding on nearly half of the cases placed in the “under adjudication” category. The first supplementary roll containing the names of the “under adjudication” voters found to be eligible to remain on the list would be published on Monday. The state government asked the police and administrative officials in all the districts to stay alert and pre-empt any disturbance to law-and-order after the publication of the supplementary roll.

The SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal resulted in the deletion of 47,294 voters in Bhabanipur, which had 2,06,295 voters at the beginning of the process. Besides, 14,154 voters of the constituency had been placed in the “under adjudication” category.

Adhikari, however, said that with the illegal migrants and other fake voters being deleted from the electoral rolls, Mamata had no chance to win again in Bhabanipur. He said that the TMC had been opposing the revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal to save the illegal migrants, who had come in from across the India-Bangladesh border and whom it had turned into its vote bank.

Adhikari is also contesting in Nandigram, where an agitation by farmers, spearheaded by Mamata and her TMC, against the proposed acquisition of land for setting up a special economic zone for chemical industries in 2007 and 2008 had set the stage for the end of the Left Front’s rule and the ascent of the TMC to power in 2011. Adhikari was then a close aide of Mamata and played a key role in TMC’s rise from the 2007-2008 agitation in Nandigram. He, however, quit the TMC and joined the BJP in December 2020, just a few months before the April-May 2021 polls. He then beat Mamata in Nandigram in the 2021 assembly elections with a margin of less than 2000 votes.

Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, a senior TMC leader, won from Bhabanipur in 2021, but he resigned, necessitating a bypoll in October 2021. Mamata won the bypoll, beating Priyanka Tibrewal with a margin of over 58000 votes.