The Trinamool Congress has decided to carry out a door-to-door scrutiny in Bhabanipur, the assembly constituency of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, after around 45,000 names were deleted from the draft voters’ list published by the Election Commission on Tuesday.
Bhabanipur had 2,06,295 voters as of January 2025. However, the draft rolls now carry 1,61,509 names, indicating that 44,787 voters (21.7 per cent of the electorate) have been deleted.
The assembly constituency comprises Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards 63, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77 and 82. The TMC sources told PTI that wards 70, 72 and 77 recorded particularly high deletions. Ward 77, a minority-dominated area, was flagged for special attention during the scrutiny.
The constituency has a sizeable population of residents from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha.
The poll panel on Tuesday published West Bengal's draft electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). More than 58 lakh voters have been deleted from the list on various grounds, including death and migration.
According to a press release by the Election Commission, out of a total 7,66,37,529 voters, 7,08,16,630 electors have submitted their enumeration forms as of December 11.
With the Commission now set to begin the process on claims and objections, the TMC has directed its local leaderships to stand by the affected voters during verification.
The party has also asked its local units to continue running the neighbourhood-level ‘May I Help You' camps to assist people with documentation, form-filling and hearings.
On Tuesday, slamming the mass deletion of voters in the draft list, the TMC said the SIR was being done in a hurried manner.
“The BJP’s narrative of the script was to show that the people who were deleted were the vote bank of Mamata Banerjee. The continuous denial of the people’s verdict in the previous three assembly elections or Lok Sabha elections, the BJP continues to deny how they have lost and why TMC has won," party leader Sashi Panja said.