Trinamool Congress leader Tapash Chatterjee on Tuesday filed an election petition before the Calcutta High Court challenging the poll result in the Rajarhat New Town Assembly constituency, where he lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Piyush Kanodia by 316 votes, News18 Bangla reported.

TMC chief Mamata Banerjee also filed an election petition before the High Court challenging the poll result in the Bhabanipur constituency, where she lost to BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari. Adhikari, West Bengal’s first BJP chief minister, had defeated Banerjee by a margin of more than 15,100 votes.

On May 4, the BJP defeated the TMC in the state polls, ending the party’s 15-year rule in West Bengal.

In the Rajarhat New Town, a ground report by Scroll had described how the TMC had a lead of 316 votes on May 4. But after an additional round of counting the next day, the BJP won the seat with the same margin. The TMC had held the seat since 2011. Chatterjee had won the seat in 2021 by a margin of more than 56,400 votes.

The Election Commission did not respond to Scroll’s queries about the need for an extra round.

The candidates of both parties accused each other of manipulating the counting process.

Chatterjee had also alleged that BJP workers had violently driven away despondent TMC counting agents, even as central forces watched, allowing the alleged counting fraud to take place. Besides him, Scroll had in May spoken to other candidates and party workers to piece together an account of what transpired in the constituency’s counting centre on May 4.

A Scroll analysis of the Election Commission’s booth-wise data also showed how the close contest went in favour of the BJP after the Hindutva party received overwhelming votes in a Muslim-majority booth. Questions sent to the Election Commission did not elicit a response.

At the heart of the controversial poll lies Musalman Para, a locality in North Kolkata with two booths: 164 and 165. Most of the registered voters in the booths are Muslim and they vote at the same polling centre, their electoral roll showed.

On May 4 and May 5, when the votes were counted, booth 164 was not counted in its scheduled round, but in a separate round at the end of the counting process. The tally in Musalman Para showed a divergence: while the BJP could only manage a few dozen votes in booth 165, it got an overwhelming majority in booth 164.

Scroll’s analysis found that the only booth to be counted on May 5 in the 18th round had 656 votes, Election Commission data showed – the exact number of votes polled in booth 164, which was skipped in the ninth round.

Here, the BJP got 637 votes and the TMC five, turning the result in the BJP’s favour with a margin of 316 votes.

When Alt News spoke to voters in the constituency, several of them described the result as impossible.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

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