Mamata Banerjee accuses Amit Shah of controlling ECI; warns against voter deletions ahead of 2026 polls
KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday once again lashed out at Union Home Minister Amit Shah, alleging that he controls the Election Commission of India (ECI). Addressing a meeting of Trinamool Congress Booth Level Agents (BLAs) at the Netaji Indoor Stadium, around 1.5 km from the office of the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) at BBD Bag, the Chief Minister intensified her attack on Shah. I have never seen such an autocratic, worthless home minister who controls the Prime Minister, she said. Notably, Abhishek Banerjee, the partys national general secretary, was absent from the meeting. However, several ministers, including controversial leader Arup Biswas, who recently resigned from the sports and youth affairs portfolio following the Salt Lake Stadium chaos on December 23, along with Sujit Bose, party MLAs and MPs, attended the programme. Think about the future if these rioters run our country. They deleted Gandhijis name from the 100-day job guarantee scheme, Mamata said. On December 11, a day after Shah slammed the ruling Trinamool Congress in the Lok Sabha over alleged Bangladeshi infiltration into Bengal on December 10, Mamata Banerjee had termed him dangerous. She accused the Centre and the ECI of using the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls to unlawfully delete the names of lakhs of eligible Bengali voters ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections. The Election Commission is working only as per the directions of the BJP. There are gross errors in the mapping of voters during the SIR exercise in the state, she alleged at Mondays meeting. The Trinamool Congress supremo also claimed that central officers appointed as micro-observers for SIR hearings have little knowledge of the local language and are unfit to conduct verifications during the second phase of the revision exercise. Mamata further alleged that Shah was directly guiding attempts to remove as many as 1.5 crore names from the electoral rolls in the state. During a previous rally in Nadia district on December 11, she had warned that she would sit on an indefinite dharna if even a single eligible voter was excluded during the SIR exercise. The countrys home minister is dangerous. His two eyes send a message of disaster. In one eye you see Duryodhan, and in the other, Dushasan, she said, dramatically intensifying her rhetoric over the past week. She also alleged that the Commission was deploying officers close to the BJP during the revision process. According to her, the Commission has deleted 44,000 dead and bogus voters from the electoral rolls in her Bhawanipore Assembly constituency, while 72,000 names have been removed from the Chowringhee seat. What do you think? Can you defeat us in the coming Assembly elections by deleting voters? she asked. Names are being deleted if someones address changes because of delimitations. We will win the battle again despite these attempts at deletions, she said, targeting the ECI. We will win Delhi (the Centre) once we come back again in Bengal, she said, urging party grassroots workers to remain alert. She asked BLAs to verify draft electoral rolls through door-to-door visits to ensure whether voters whose names were deleted during the SIR exercise were genuine cases. Voters whose names have been deleted can fill up Form VI and Annexure IV and submit them to the concerned Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) for inclusion, she said. She also instructed BLAs to carefully check whether voters who were unmapped during the first phase of the SIR process had been issued notices by the Election Commission for hearings.
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