TMC says EC's clarification vindicates Mamata Banerjee's allegation about 'ghost voters', BJP cries foul

Kolkata: The Trinamool Congress has termed the explanation of the Election Commission over identical Electoral Photo Identity Card numbers issued to voters of different states as a vindication of its supremo Mamata Banerjee’s allegation about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s bid to bring in outsiders to cast votes in West Bengal.

The party dismissed the EC’s explanation as a “damage-control” exercise and vowed to continue the scrutiny of the electoral rolls across West Bengal and foil the conspiracy of the BJP to bring in outsiders to vote in its favour during the assembly elections in West Bengal.

“This is Bengal. We will not let them (the BJP) repeat in Bengal what they did in Maharashtra and Delhi. We, led by Mamata Banerjee, will foil all their conspiracies,” Kunal Ghosh, a senior leader of the TMC, wrote on X, shortly after the EC issued the clarification.

Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, had on Thursday accused the BJP of manipulating the electoral rolls with the blessings of the EC and of enrolling people from Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat as voters in West Bengal. She had tasked her party’s leaders and workers across the state to run a campaign to detect the ‘ghost voters’ in the electoral rolls within 10 days.

She had cited a few examples of people of Haryana, Gujarat and Punjab having the same EPIC numbers as the voters of West Bengal. She had alleged that the electoral rolls of West Bengal had been manipulated to make it easier for the BJP to bring in people from other states to cast votes in West Bengal in its favour and against the TMC during the 2026 assembly elections.

The EC on Sunday clarified that duplication in the EPIC number did not imply duplicate or fake voters. The poll panel stated that some cases of duplicate EPIC numbers had been caused by the use of identical alphanumeric series by two different States or Union Territories.

The BJP already cried foul over the TMC’s campaign about the ‘ghost voters’ from Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat allegedly making their way into the electoral roll in West Bengal, with Banerjee’s allegations setting the stage for her party to once again brand the saffron party as an ‘outsider’ in the state and rerun the “local versus outsider” blitzkrieg, which had helped her win the 2021 state assembly elections.

The state BJP heavyweight, Suvendu Adhikari, urged the EC to act against the ‘biased’ officers of the government of West Bengal for aiding the TMC’s campaign for scrutiny of the electoral rolls. The Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly specifically demanded action against a Block Development Officer of Shantipur in Nadia after the officer called the leaders of local units of all political parties to discuss the electoral rolls in his capacity as the Assistant Returning Officer of two assembly constituencies.  

The TMC, however, vowed to continue its campaign. “We will neither trust the EC nor rely on it,” said Ghosh, who said that the commission, in its clarification, had vindicated the West Bengal chief minister’s allegation about the people of different states being assigned the same EPIC numbers but had not explained how it had happened.