KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee held a meeting with her party’s Booth Level Agents-2 (BLAs-2) in the Bhowanipore Assembly constituency, from where she is set to contest again in the upcoming state elections.
This was her third such meeting since mid-December last year. She asked the BLAs-2 to keep a close watch to ensure that names of genuine voters are not removed during the ongoing hearings under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and that illegal voters are not included in the lists.
According to sources, the ruling party chief sensitised the BLAs and instructed them to assist voters belonging to the “logical discrepancy” and “unmapped” categories who have been summoned for SIR hearings in the Bhowanipore area.
Mamata also reportedly asked them to prepare a report on voters who have collected enumeration forms (EFs) required for the Election Commission of India (ECI)-conducted SIR exercise but are yet to submit them to the concerned Booth Level Officers (BLOs).
Earlier, she had held two separate meetings in mid-December and at the end of January with around 267 BLAs-2 on the same issue. Senior party leaders and ministers, including Subrata Bakshi and Kolkata Mayor and Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim, along with councillors, were present at those meetings.
The deletion of around 45,000 dead and bogus voters in the draft electoral rolls during the first phase of the SIR process in Bhowanipore has prompted the Trinamool Congress leadership to pay special attention to the Chief Minister’s constituency.
Political analysts believe that, apart from the 45,000 deleted voters, the names of another 7,000 to 8,000 electors may be removed from the final electoral rolls scheduled to be published on February 28.
BLAs-2 have been instructed to closely monitor Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards 63 and 72 in Bhowanipore during the ongoing SIR hearings, as these wards have a significant number of non-Bengali-speaking Hindi voters. The opposition BJP has strong penetration among these voters.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Trinamool Congress trailed the BJP by a significant margin in these two wards.
Ward 72 is also considered important for the Trinamool Congress in terms of minority vote banks, as it has a considerable minority population, traditionally a strong support base for the ruling party. The Trinamool has decided to focus particularly on this ward during the hearings to ensure that names of minority voters are not intentionally deleted from the rolls.
Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, who defeated Mamata Banerjee in the Nandigram constituency in the 2021 Assembly elections, has announced that he will personally take the initiative to strengthen the BJP’s electoral organisation in Bhowanipore to defeat her in the coming elections.
Mamata had won the Bhowanipore bypoll in 2021 by a margin of 60,000 votes against a BJP candidate. With the deletion of 45,000 voters in the draft rolls, the contest this time is set to become significant for both the Trinamool Congress and the BJP.