A few hundred Aadhaar cards, voters’ photo identity cards and Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREG) Scheme job cards were recovered from several Trinamool Congress (TMC) offices in West Bengal on Sunday by local residents and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers who alleged that these were forcefully taken from voters before previous elections.
Genuine voters were forced to stay home on election days, they alleged.
In one of the incidents, over 100 Aadhaar cards were found at a TMC office at Basanti Debi Colony in the Bidhan Nagar assembly constituency on the eastern outskirts of Kolkata. A number of these cards were issued in 2021, when the TMC won 213 of West Bengal’s 294 seats against the BJP’s 77.
“Most of the cards were still in sealed postal envelopes, indicating they were not delivered to the recipients. Local people also found some land deeds locked in a briefcase,” a Bidhan Nagar police officer said, requesting anonymity.
Dr Sharadwat Mukherjee, an oncologist and newly-elected BJP legislator from Bidhan Nagar said, “Genuine voters were threatened and stopped from exercising their right to franchise. We repeatedly said this during our campaign. Our position is vindicated today.”
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Former fire services minister Sujit Bose, who won the Bidhan Nagar seat four times in a row since 2009 before being defeated, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on May 11 on charges of corruption in civic body recruitments and remanded in the federal agency’s custody.
Chameli Naskar, the TMC councillor from the area where the party office is located, claimed she knew nothing about the Aadhaar cards.
“The allegation is made up. I don’t think our party can stoop to such level. Let there be an investigation,” Naskar said.
In a second incident, a few hundred voter ID cards were found lying in a field in the Kirnahar area of Birbhum district, a TMC bastion for 15 years.
“Local people informed the authorities and the cards were seized,” a police officer said.
BJP state vice-president Jagannath Chattopadhyay, who won Birbhum’s Siuri seat, said, “There must be thousands of such cards lying in TMC offices across the district. TMC established a reign of terror but the tables have turned now. Law will take its own course.”
In a third incident, BJP supporters recovered a few hundred MNREG job cards and voter ID cards from a TMC office at Garbeta in West Midnapore district.
Palash Das, a local BJP worker, said, “Such cards will be found in all TMC offices if there is a search operation.”
No district TMC leader commented on the recoveries.
On Sunday afternoon, the BJP state president Samik Bhattacharya addressed voters at South 24 Parganas district’s Falta assembly seat where a bypoll will be held on May 21 because on April 29, when the constituency went to polls, voters claimed that sitting TMC MLA Jahangir Khan and his men threatened them with dire consequences if they left home.
Saidul Khan, the MLA’s brother-in-law, was arrested Friday on charges of assault and attempted murder.
“People of Falta could never cast the ballot freely. Before the 2021 elections, announcements were made through loudspeakers in mosques, instructing people to stay home. Fear no more. The BJP government is here. TMC will soon be a thing of the past,” Bhattacharya told voters at the rally.
Before the recent elections, which witnessed an unprecedented 93% voter turnout and the BJP’s first victory in the state with 207 seats, TMC chairperson Mamata Banerjee alleged that the deletion and delisting of voters during the special intensive revision (SIR) of Bengal’s electoral roll dealt a blow to people’s democratic rights.
There were around 76.6 million voters in the state before the SIR started. It led to the removal of around 9.1 million names. This includes earlier deletions of around 6.3 million names and an additional 2.7 million voters declared ineligible after adjudication.
The number of names deleted is highest in the districts of Murshidabad and Malda, where Muslim populations are 66.28% and 52.27% respectively– the state’s highest, according to the 2011 census.
The BJP, on the other hand, alleged that while thousands of Hindu voters were stopped from casting their ballots in one election after another, infiltrators from Bangladesh were allowed to settle down and provided with Aadhaar and voter ID cards.
On Friday night, residents of Hingalganj in North 24 Parganas district handed Saidul Gazi, an alleged infiltrator from Satkhira, Bangladesh, over to the police, saying he cast his vote in the recent election.
“Jainal Abedin, a local TMC gram panchayat member, gave me Aadhaar and voter ID cards declaring his own parents as mine,” Gazi said before police arrested him. Police said Abedin was absconding.
HT tried to reach out to the TMC state vice president Jay Prakash Majumdar and state general secretary Kunal Ghosh for comments but neither answered the calls.
