West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress Supremo Mamata Banerjee, alongside party General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee, will spearhead a high-voltage protest march in central Kolkata on November 4, 2025—the very day the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls kicks off statewide. The procession, starting at 2 p.m. from the B.R. Ambedkar statue on Red Road and culminating at Rabindranath Tagore’s ancestral Jorasanko Thakurbari, has been framed by TMC as a “Save Democracy, Stop Voter Deletion” campaign.
Party sources confirm a full mobilization: all 2.94 lakh booth-level workers have been directed to assemble by 1:30 p.m., with MPs, MLAs, and councillors tasked to camp at enumeration centers to “ensure zero wrongful deletions.” In a counter-strike, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari will lead a parallel BJP rally in Agarpara (North 24 Parganas), signaling a polarized electoral battlefield months ahead of the 2026 Assembly polls.
The flashpoint is SIR—an ECI-mandated door-to-door verification exercise using Form 12D to weed out duplicate, deceased, or shifted voters, scheduled from November 4 to December 3, 2025, with a final voter list publication on January 6, 2026. TMC alleges the exercise is a veiled NRC rerun, citing four recent suicides in Murshidabad and Malda where families claim victims were “traumatized by SIR notices.”
Abhishek Banerjee, in a Friday virtual meet with 40,000 party functionaries, issued a three-point war cry: (1) MPs/MLAs must visit every booth daily, (2) accompany BLOs (Booth Level Officers) during house-to-house checks, and (3) file mass Form 7 objections against any deletion attempts. “This is not revision—it is voter cleansing targeting minorities and the poor,” he charged, invoking Assam’s NRC debacle where 19 lakh were left stateless.
Escalating the rhetoric, TMC heavyweight and state minister Aroop Biswas lodged a formal complaint with West Bengal’s Chief Electoral Officer on October 31, accusing Adhikari of “criminal intimidation” under BNS Section 351. The letter quotes Adhikari’s October 28 press meet: “BLOs in Bihar are in jail for fake voters—same will happen here. We have documents; you will rot in prison if you don’t act.” TMC claims this violates ECI’s Model Code and statutory protections for election officials, demanding immediate FIR and CEO intervention. BJP counters that Adhikari was merely “warning against electoral fraud,” citing 1.2 crore bogus voters allegedly added post-2021 under TMC rule—a charge the ruling party dismisses as baseless.
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The stakes are colossal: West Bengal’s voter roll stands at 7.49 crore (as per January 2025 draft), with SIR targeting an estimated 80-90 lakh anomalies. ECI data shows 42 lakh new voters added since 2021, alongside 28 lakh deletions—figures TMC brands as “demographic engineering.” Meanwhile, BJP’s internal surveys predict a 3-5% swing if “ghost voters” are pruned, potentially flipping 40-50 marginal seats. As Kolkata gears up for dueling marches—red-green TMC flags versus saffron BJP banners—the Election Commission has deployed 15,000 additional central forces and 1,000 web-casting units at sensitive booths, bracing for a political storm that could redefine Bengal’s electoral map.
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