Mamata Banerjee’s stand-off with the Election Commission entered its second day on Saturday, as the West Bengal Chief Minister continued her sit-in protest at Kolkata’s Metro Channel. Having spent the night at the demonstration site in the heart of Esplanade, surrounded by a cohort of senior Trinamool Congress leaders and stone-faced security, Banerjee has effectively turned one of the city's busiest stretches into a makeshift command centre for her campaign against the recent electoral roll revisions.
The protest was sparked by the release of staggering official data on February 28, which revealed that some 63.66 lakh names — roughly 8.3 per cent of the state's electorate — have been scrubbed from the rolls since the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) began in November. With the voter base shrinking from 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore, and another 60.06 lakh voters currently "under adjudication," the Chief Minister has pulled no punches, accusing the poll body of conspiring with the BJP to "disenfranchise" Bengal’s voters ahead of the looming assembly elections.
Addressing a sea of supporters on Friday afternoon, Banerjee alleged that the process was being used to systematically target genuine voters, claiming many had been "wrongly marked as dead." In her characteristic fiery style, she challenged the authorities, vowing to parade these "living" voters before the media and the Commission itself to expose what she describes as a blatant attempt to manipulate the democratic process.
The timing of the sit-in is no coincidence; it comes just days before the full bench of the Election Commission is due to arrive in West Bengal to oversee poll preparations. As state ministers and party faithful continue to flock to the Metro Channel, the political temperature in Kolkata is reaching boiling point. For the TMC, this isn't just a technical dispute over data— it is a battle for the very foundations of the upcoming election.
Also read: Mamata stages sit-in over voter list scrutiny
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