West Bengal polls: Didi claims attempts to cancel her nomination from Bhowanipur

KOLKATA: Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee on Saturday claimed that an attempt was made to cancel her Bhowanipore nomination through a “false affidavit”. She submitted her nomination on April 8 and it was accepted on April 10 after review.Bhowanipore currently has 13 candidates, one of the highest number of candidates in Bengal, including eight independent candidates, more than the number of registered political parties. Two complaints against her, which were traced to one of Nadia’s independent candidates, were dismissed, sources said.“We are not fighting the BJP but the party’s vanishing machine. In my own constituency, those traitors filed two false affidavits against me to cancel my nomination. They didn’t succeed, but remember, they tried… They made a lot of efforts to keep me from competing. So, you can understand: If they can do this to me, what can they do to you? ” Banerjee said.One of the objections stated that the proposer, Ismat Hakim, is the spouse of Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim and there was a “name mismatch”. She had earlier used her maiden name Ismat Ara but updated the documents to Ismat Hakim. Documents submitted during the review addressed that issue.“Normally, these things take a few minutes. But when all the proposers were forced to wait for two hours after the chief minister submitted his nomination, we got some hint of it,” said a TMC member monitoring the Bhovanipore polls.Another objection alleged undisclosed criminal cases from two decades ago when Banerjee was in opposition. “This cannot be proven and no evidence has been provided,” the party staffer said, adding that she had marked the column as “not applicable.”The third hot spot involves ballot logistics. The initial 17 candidates risked pushing Banerjee’s name to the second EVM as one cell can show 16 names. TMC objected. “The sitting CM cannot be pushed to the second EVM. It will cause chaos,” the official said. Four nominations were later cancelled, eliminating the need for multiple machines.