Mamata Banerjee Names CEC and EC IT Chief in Bengal Rigging Charge as Abhishek Claims 150 Seats Were Swung

Former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday moved the opposition's fight with the Election Commission from broad demands to named officials, accusing Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the Commission's Director General (IT), Seema Khanna, of manipulating the state's voter rolls and the vote count. Her nephew and MP Abhishek Banerjee went further, claiming that in 150 of Bengal's assembly constituencies, voter deletions and pending adjudication cases outnumbered the winning margin.

The press conference in New Delhi came a day after 23 parties of the INDIA bloc met in the capital to plan joint action over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. That meeting, where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge set out six demands, is covered in our earlier report. Thursday's event was the Trinamool leadership's own escalation on top of that joint platform.

The specific allegations

Banerjee said she had been ahead by around 15,000 votes in Bhabanipur, the Kolkata seat she lost to Suvendu Adhikari, now chief minister, before counting centres were, in her words, captured after two or three rounds. She alleged her agents were assaulted and driven out, CCTV coverage was blocked and EVMs were tampered with. She said she was confident that Khanna and Kumar had hijacked the counting process in the state.

She singled out Khanna, the official in charge of the Commission's IT division, saying the Trinamool had earlier written to question her appointment and accusing her of being behind abrupt deletions from the final roll. Banerjee also argued that a once-decentralised election machinery has been centralised, pointing to complaints from a West Bengal civil service officers' body that electoral registration officers had their access to the ECINET software blocked.

On numbers, she said close to 3.5 lakh voters were removed from the rolls between the 2021 and 2026 polls, and presented district-wise data she said showed the heaviest deletions in areas the Trinamool had previously won. She also attacked the 2023 law giving the CEC and election commissioners legal immunity, noting it was passed while 147 opposition MPs were suspended from Parliament.

Abhishek Banerjee questioned why BJP leaders, rather than Commission officials, were answering charges directed at the CEC.

Where the Election Commission stands

None of these claims has been tested in court, and the Commission has not accepted any of them. In recent weeks it has maintained that its SIR orders carry full legal sanction and follow statutory procedure, and that differing views among commissioners are a normal part of internal deliberation. That position came after reports that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had repeatedly objected on record to SIR decisions. The Trinamool has also challenged aspects of the SIR in the Supreme Court.

Why it matters

Naming a serving IT official, and putting a figure on how many seats were allegedly affected, raises the political cost of the dispute for both sides. It hands the Commission specific claims it can rebut with data, and it gives the opposition a sharper narrative ahead of its planned district-level marches and rallies. The same day, Rahul Gandhi publicly asked who at the Commission directed Tata Consultancy Services, which built the ECINET platform, to add an SIR declaration to the online Form 6, a change the Commission has since withdrawn in several states. Taken together, the opposition is now targeting both the people and the systems behind the roll revision, not just the outcome.

This is an original summary based on public reporting. See our editorial policy for how we source, write, and correct our stories.