Bogus voters: Mamata, ECI duel set to intensify in run-up to 2026 Bengal Assembly polls

New Delhi: Ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections, three-time West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s allegation on the addition of names of bogus voters to the state electoral roll may have been refuted by the Election Commission of India, but the controversy is unlikely to end just yet.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the ECI countered CM Banerjee and clarified that duplication in EPIC number “does not imply duplicate/fake voters” while acknowledging some cases of duplicate EPIC numbers caused by the use of identical alphanumeric series by two different States/UTs.

While the BJP described the ECI response as a setback to CM Banerjee, the Trinamool supremo showed little signs of retreating from her combative stand against the electoral panel.

Trinamool chief Banerjee’s allegations are no different from the reactions of other INDIA bloc parties that were defeated by the BJP in recent Assembly elections, including Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi.

The timing of CM Banerjee’s anti-ECI tirade — almost one year before the Assembly election and immediately after ally AAP’s loss in Delhi elections — appears aimed at energising party cadre involved in a drive for physical verification of electoral rolls.

The BJP has countered CM Banerjee’s combative posturing by accusing her of resorting to misinformation to lay the groundwork for her imminent defeat in 2026 and weaken voters’ confidence in the electoral system.

In a counter-offensive, BJP co-incharge of West Bengal Amit Malviya accused the ruling Trinamool Congress of including names of illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya settlers in the electoral rolls.

“We demand that @ECISVEEP prioritise a voter roll cleanup in West Bengal and remove illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya settlers, whom the TMC has placed across the state as Mamata Banerjee’s vote bank. The ECI must also thwart TMC’s attempts to eliminate the names of linguistic minorities and Hindu refugees — including the Matua community, who fled religious persecution and settled in Bengal — from the voter roll,” said Malviya in a post on social media.

His comments were a virtual endorsement of similar allegations made by former West Bengal Congress chief and the former Lok Sabha member Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury who accused Trinamool Congress of enlisting several lakhs of bogus voters in the state with the help of a private agency.

The raging debate over alleged bogus voters was intensified last week by CM Banerjee when she alleged that the BJP, with the help of two private agencies, was enlisting voters from other states like Haryana, Gujarat, Bihar, Punjab, and Rajasthan as voters in West Bengal.

Addressing party workers, the 70-year Trinamool chief said, “They are linking the names of voters from other states with the EPIC number of voters in West Bengal. Similar misappropriations were made before the elections in states like Delhi, Maharashtra, and Haryana, which helped the BJP to win there.”

“The other parties there were unable to detect the trick. But we in Bengal have been able to identify the trick well in advance and hence we will never allow the plot to be successful here,” the Chief Minister said.

Banerjee’s allegations on the addition of names of bogus voters to electoral rolls come close to similar remarks by her INDIA bloc partners like AAP National Convenor Arvind Kejriwal, whose party lost the recent Delhi Assembly election last month.

Last month, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi accused the ECI of not sharing the electoral rolls for the Lok Sabha election 2024 and the voter list for the Maharashtra Assembly elections last year, raising suspicion of the addition of bogus voters to benefit the BJP and its allies.

Raising doubts about alleged bungling in the voter list for the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election which was won by the BJP-led Mahayuti, LoP Gandhi alleged that as many as 39 lakh voters were added to the voters’ list after the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, just six months before the Maharashtra Assembly elections in November 2024.

On Sunday, cautioning against a threat to the demographic sanctity of Bharat, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar hit out at sudden demographic changes in certain pockets that invariably influence poll outcomes.

Delivering the fourth P. Parameswaran Memorial Lecture on the theme ‘Democracy, Demography, Development and the Future of Bharat’ in Thiruvananthapuram, the former Governor of West Bengal said, “We have fortresses in the country that have emerged in the last few years, where the outcome of the election is always foreclosed by democratic, demographic dislocations.”

He said, “Policy interventions alone are not sufficient to address these daunting challenges. We have to recognise these challenges as existential to our nationalism and also to our democracy.”

Over 7.5 crore voters in West Bengal are likely to pick 294 new legislators around April-May next year. In the 2021 Assembly polls, the TMC won 215 seats in the House with 148 as the majority mark.

Anti-incumbency, allegations of corruption and job scams, allegations of sexual assault on many women of Sandeshkhali and the public outrage over a doctor’s rape and murder in a Kolkata government hospital are some of the factors that political analysts expect to be raised by the Opposition parties in the 2026 Assembly election in the state.

IANS