Central forces look on in viral Bengal violence video. Men doing the hitting are from the BJP

On April 29, the second day of polling in West Bengal, a viral video from the state showed a group of men assaulting others in a narrow lane. Strikingly, Central forces patrolling the lane watched the violence, without intervening.

Media reports described it as a clash between workers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress.

The party affiliation of the assailants, who were not stopped by the Central paramilitary forces as they thrashed others, was not immediately clear. But Scroll has confirmed that at least two of them were from the BJP.

One of them is Manash Dey, the bespectacled man who could be seen hitting a man in a blue T-shirt in the video around the four-second mark. In September 2025, the BJP appointed him the vice-president of the Barrackpore organisational committee.

Dey told Scroll that he was trying to stop the workers of the “other” party from “disturbing” the polling.

A brawl on polling day

The violence unfolded near polling station 120 in Noapara Assembly constituency in North 24 Parganas district. It was captured on camera by news organisations like ANI and News 18 Bangla.

The video shows a group of five men dressed in white kurtas and shirts chasing three men in a narrow lane, pushing them up against a wall and beating them up, as nearly a dozen paramilitary personnel look on.

“There was lack of security near the local polling station and these people were trying to enter it since morning and disturb the voting,” Dey told Scroll. Asked which party these men belonged to, he said, “I don’t know, but you can guess which party’s worker would do this.”

Dey, who has been with the BJP since 2018, alleged that the election agent of the “other party” was trying to forcibly get voters to the booth. “So I slapped him a few times,” he said. “Nothing more.”

The Trinamool Congress candidate in Noapara, Trinankur Bhattacharya, told Scroll that one of the men being assaulted in the video is Sanjay Das, the husband of the local Trinamool Congress councillor, Surpriya Das. The two appear towards the end of the video, where Supriya is trying to shield her husband from a man wielding a stick.

“The BJP workers were trying to capture the booth,” he said.

When we told him that Dey made the same allegation against the Trinamool Congress, Bhattacharya demanded proof for it.

“The Central forces did not act because they probably had instructions from above,” Bhattacharya added. “After polling ended, not a single BJP worker was detained by the police, whereas several TMC workers were picked up.”

Supriya Das, councillor of ward number 13 in North Barrackpore Municipality, said that the violence occurred five minutes after she and her husband approached the paramilitary personnel with a request. “That booth has mostly Muslim voters and BJP workers were constantly coming within 100 metres of it,” she said. “We asked the central forces to keep a check on them.”

The councillor was upset with how the armed forces did not intervene to save her husband from lathi blows. “They are supposed to protect us,” she said. “But they are sold out.”

Questions sent to the Election Commission of India, which is in charge of deployment of Central troops during elections, did not immediately elicit a response.

The second assaulter

Dey added that the other assailants in the video include an independent candidate and their agent. He could not identify them.

But at least one other person in the video is part of the BJP. This is the man in a white shirt and denim jeans seen at the 12 second mark in the ANI video.

He can be seen in an election gathering of Noapara BJP candidate Arjun Singh in a photo shared on his Facebook page.

He is also present in another photograph shared by the page on the same day.

Noapara recorded a turnout of 87.12%, according to the Election Commission of India’s approximate polling trends.

Ahead of the elections, the Election Commission had deployed 2.4 lakh Central Armed Police Forces personnel in West Bengal. About 70,000 personnel will remain in place even after polling.