Congress candidate Motab Shaikh, whose name was deleted from the electoral rolls during the special intensive revision and later restored by an appellate tribunal, won West Bengal’s Farakka Assembly on Monday.
Shaikh defeated his nearest rival, Sudhir Chowdhuri of the Bharatiya Janata Party, by more than 8,000 votes.
On April 5, it was reported that the appellate tribunal set up in Kolkata, to hear applications of those deleted from West Bengal’s voter lists, directed the Election Commission to declare Shaikh a valid voter of Murshidabad through an additional list.
Shaikh’s was the first case to be decided by the tribunal.
In his order, TS Sivagnanam, a retired chief justice of the Calcutta High Court, had noted that the Election Commission had cited “technical reasons” for not providing the circumstances leading to Shaikh’s name being deleted during the adjudication process,.
He had stated that the passport submitted by Shaikh was sufficient proof, pointing out that there was no discrepancy in his father’s name in any record.
In a similar case, Congress candidate Mohammad Mottakin Alam was also restored to the voter list by a tribunal after it ruled that discrepancies cited by the authorities, including questions over parentage and age differences, were not valid grounds for exclusion.
Alam contested from Ratua but finished third with more than 31,000 votes, while Trinamool Congress candidate Samar Mukherjee won the seat with over 1 lakh votes.
The elections in West Bengal followed a special intensive revision of electoral rolls by the poll panel. By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of the electorate before the process began, had been removed. Lakhs of cases challenging their removal from the voter list are pending before appellate tribunals. The exact number is unclear.
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BJP wins Bengal
In the results declared on Monday, the BJP won 206 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly, ending a 15-year rule of the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC.
A party or an alliance needs 148 seats in the Assembly to secure a majority. The TMC had won 80 seats and was leading in one constituency, data from the Election Commission showed at 8.30 am on Tuesday.
The Congress and former minister Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party won two seats each. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the All India Secular Front secured one win each.
Banerjee lost to BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari by more than 15,000 votes in the Bhabanipur constituency. Adhikari had defeated Banerjee in Nandigram seat in the 2021 polls, after which the TMC chief had been elected to the Assembly from Bhabanipur in a bye-election.
Votes in 293 constituencies were counted on Monday as the Election Commission has ordered repolling in the Falta Assembly seat citing “severe electoral offences”. The polling there will be held on May 21 and the votes will be counted on May 24.
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