Kolkata: The draft voters’ list in West Bengal, which was published earlier in the day, shows that a total of 44,770 voters from the previous list as of October 2025 have been excluded in the Bhabanipur Assembly constituency in South Kolkata, where the elected legislator is Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
The number of voters excluded from booth number 260, where both Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress General Secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, cast their votes, stands at 127. Out of these 127 voters, 13 are deceased voters, and the rest are either shifted voters or untraceable or duplicate voters, or those found suitable for exclusion for other reasons.
To recall, in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls, Adhikari got elected from Nandigram, defeating the Chief Minister and the Trinamool Congress candidate Mamata Banerjee by a little less than 2,000 voters.
Later, Mamata Banerjee got elected in the by-elections from Bhabanipur and retained her chair as the Chief Minister for the third consecutive term.
Incidentally, Bhabanipur is one of the seven Assembly constituencies under the Kolkata (Dakshin) Lok Sabha constituency.
During the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, although the Trinamool Congress candidate Mala Roy got elected for the second time from Kolkata (Dakshin), she trailed in the majority of municipal corporation wards in both Bhabanipur and its adjacent Rashbehari constituency.
In 2024, Trinamool Congress even trailed in Ward Number 73 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, where the Chief Minister is a voter.
In October this year, the Chief Minister expressed apprehension of manipulation in the voters’ list in the Bhabanipur constituency and also indirectly accused the BJP, without naming the party, of trying to relocate outsiders in Bhabanipur.
Reacting to such an allegation from the Chief Minister, BJP’s IT Cell Chief and the party’s central observer for West Bengal, Amit Malviya, then issued a statement claiming such apprehension by the Chief Minister was nothing but fear of facing defeat in the constituency during the Assembly polls.
(IANS)
