Kamal Ghorui
KOLKATA: Bengal CM and Trinamool chief, Mamata Banerjee, alleged on Saturday attempts to cancel her Bhowanipore nomination through “false affidavits”. She filed a nomination on April 8, and it was accepted April 10 after scrutiny.Bhowanipore now has 13 candidates, among the highest in Bengal, including eight Independents outnumbering those from registered parties. Two complaints against her, traced to an Independent candidate from Nadia, were rejected, according to sources.“Our fight is not with BJP, but with the party’s vanishing machine. In my own constituency, those traitors filed two false affidavits against me to cancel my nomination. They did not succeed, but remember, they tried… They made many efforts to stop me from contesting. So, you can understand: if they can do this to me, what can they do to you?” Banerjee said.One objection flagged a “name mismatch” involving proposer Ismat Hakim, spouse of Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim. She had earlier used the premarital surname Ismat Ara but updated documents to Ismat Hakim. Documentation submitted during scrutiny resolved the issue.“Usually, these matters take a couple of minutes. But we had an inkling of this when all the proposers were made to wait for two hours after the CM filed her nomination,” a TMC member overseeing Bhowanipore polls said.Another objection alleged undisclosed criminal cases from two decades ago when Banerjee was in opposition. “This could not be proven, nor was any evidence produced,” the party functionary said, adding she had marked that column “not applicable”.A third flashpoint involved ballot logistics. The initial field of 17 candidates risked pushing Banerjee’s name onto a second EVM, as one unit can display 16 names. TMC objected. “A sitting CM cannot be pushed to a second EVM. It would have caused confusion,” the functionary said. Four nominations were later cancelled, removing the need for multiple machines.
