West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday, March 6, began a sit-in protest in central Kolkata against the alleged arbitrary deletion of names from the post-SIR electoral rolls, escalating the ruling All India Trinamool Congress’s confrontation with the Election Commission of India ahead of the state assembly elections.
Banerjee launched the dharna at Esplanade Metro Channel, accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Election Commission of conspiring to disenfranchise Bengali voters.
“I will expose the BJP–EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters,” the TMC supremo said while addressing supporters at the start of the protest.
She also alleged that several voters had been wrongly marked as deceased in the revised electoral rolls and said they would be brought to the protest site as proof, as reported by PTI. “I will present those voters who have been declared dead by the Election Commission at this protest site,” Banerjee said.
The sit-in, which began around 2:15 pm, had been announced earlier by TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, who accused the poll panel of carrying out a “politically motivated” exercise that could disenfranchise lakhs of legitimate voters.
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The protest marks a sharp political escalation by the ruling party days after the Election Commission released the revised post-SIR electoral rolls that significantly altered the contours of the state’s electorate.
According to official data released on February 28, around 63.66 lakh names — about 8.3% of the electorate — have been deleted since the SIR process began in November last year, reducing the voter base from roughly 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore.
In addition, more than 60.06 lakh electors have been placed in the “under adjudication” category, meaning their eligibility will be determined through legal scrutiny in the coming weeks — a process that could further reshape constituency-level electoral dynamics in the state.
Meanwhile, Union minister Giriraj Singh accused Banerjee of staging the sit-in to protect “infiltrators belonging to the minority community”. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a programme, the senior BJP leader alleged that the TMC government would soon be voted out of power and warned “partisan state government officials and lumpens sheltered by the TMC” to mend their ways or face consequences.
“Banerjee is only interested in saving infiltrators belonging to the Muslim community, which constitutes the bulk of her vote bank. She should be ashamed that she is holding a sit-in protest in the Esplanade area to save infiltrators, with whose help she managed to win the previous elections. But not any more,” Singh said.
He also alleged that central funds worth ₹15 lakh crore given to the state had been misused by TMC functionaries and claimed that industrial growth in West Bengal had fallen sharply over the years.
Singh further accused both the TMC and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) of encouraging “goondaism” in the state, asserting that the BJP would counter what he described as intimidation and strong-arm tactics.
Later in the day, Singh flagged off the BJP’s ‘Parivartan Yatra’ at Narayangarh in Paschim Medinipur district. The rally was among nine such yatras being organised across West Bengal between March 1 and 10 as part of the party’s mass outreach campaign ahead of the assembly elections.
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