KOLKATA — West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee initiated an indefinite sit-in protest at Kolkata’s Esplanade Metro Channel on Friday, March 6, 2026. The move marks a major escalation in the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) confrontation with the Election Commission (EC) over the massive deletion of names from the state’s electoral rolls following the Strategic Integrated Revision (SIR) process.
The TMC supremo accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Election Commission of a coordinated “conspiracy” to disenfranchise millions of Bengali voters ahead of the upcoming state assembly polls. “I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise our people,” Banerjee declared as the protest began at 2:15 PM. She specifically alleged that the revised rolls wrongly marked thousands of living citizens as deceased to strip them of their voting rights. In a dramatic gesture, the Chief Minister vowed to personally present several of these “declared dead” voters at the protest site to prove her allegations.
The controversy stems from official data released on February 28, which revealed that 63.66 lakh names—roughly 8.3 per cent of the total electorate—have been purged since the SIR process began in November last year. This has reduced West Bengal’s voter base from 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore. Furthermore, an additional 60.06 lakh electors have been placed in an “under adjudication” category, leaving their eligibility for the upcoming elections subject to intense legal scrutiny.
TMC National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee had previously characterized the revision as a “politically motivated” exercise designed to alter constituency-level electoral equations. As the dharna continues in central Kolkata, the political atmosphere in the state remains highly charged, with the ruling party demanding an immediate stay on the implementation of the new rolls until a transparent re-verification process is conducted.
