West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee (file photo)
NEW DELHI: “Consider me your candidate in all 294 constituencies,” Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said in a poll rally, urging voters to look beyond individual nominees and rally behind her leadership.As Mamata Banerjee took the stage in Paschim Medinipur’s Chandrakona on, her message cut through the campaign noise with a clear pitch: leadership over labels. In poll-bound West Bengal, where assembly elections are scheduled in two phases on April 23 and April 29, the Trinamool Congress supremo positioned herself as the face of the contest across all constituencies.She exuded confidence a day after her strongest rival in the state, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, filed nominations from Bhabanipur, also contested by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, and from Nandigram, where he had defeated her in the 2021 elections.At the rally, Banerjee also flagged what she described as irregularities in voter enrolment, citing inputs from her nephew and party leader Abhishek Banerjee. “I was informed by Abhishek (Banerjee) yesterday that he had to rush to the EC office in Kolkata from the middle of his campaign schedule upon receiving information that about 30,000 forms were submitted in a single day to include fresh voters,” the TMC supremo said. Escalating her attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party, she alleged attempts to manipulate electoral rolls by bringing in voters from other states. “The BJP is trying to include illegal voters from Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in the electoral rolls of Bengal. They are planning to transport outstation voters by means of railways, as they did in Bihar,” she claimed.CM Mamata further accused the BJP of acting in concert with the Election Commission of India, alleging targeted deletions from voter lists. “The BJP and EC are snatching the citizenship, constitutional and democratic rights of people. We will fight them every inch of the way,” she said.Sharpening the political contrast, she warned of cultural and policy impositions if the BJP were to come to power in the state. Maintaining that the party has “no respect” for Bengal, she claimed it would impose “ban on non-veg food consumption” and attempt to introduce the National Register of Citizens through the backdoor, including plans to send targeted citizens to detention camps.With high-stakes rhetoric and a direct appeal to voters, Mamata’s pitch in Paschim Medinipur underscored a campaign that is as much about personality as it is about party.
