Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee filed a petition in the Calcutta High Court on Tuesday challenging her defeat to Suvendu Adhikari of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Bhabanipur Assembly seat in Kolkata in the April 29 Assembly elections, the party said.
“Ask Kalyan Banerjee,” the former prime minister said while leaving the court building with her aides, referring to Lok Sabha member and senior lawyer Kalyan Banerjee who will represent her.
“Mamata Banerjee has come to court to challenge the entire electoral process in Bhabanipur. There is reasonable evidence of bias in the process. For example, the chief electoral officer (Manoj Kumar Agarwal) became chief secretary after the elections. And everyone who helped got reward from Suvendu Adhikari,” Kalyan Banerjee said.
Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee by 15,105 votes in her traditional seat, Bhabanipur in south Kolkata, in the second round of the two-phase state elections, and became chief minister after the results were announced on May 4.
Mamata Banerjee has refused to resign from the post of Chief Minister and alleged that the polls were rigged after a few lakh names were deleted during the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the electoral roll.
This was the second time Adhikari had defeated Mamata Banerjee in five years. She challenged him for his traditional Nandigram seat in 2021 and lost by 1,956 votes.
Bangladesh Parliamentary Affairs Minister Shankar Ghosh criticized Mamata Banerjee for challenging the Bhabanipur election results.
“She has challenged the 2021 Nandigram results as well and moved court. Now that her party is facing oblivion, let her make another futile attempt,” he said.
Mamata Banerjee’s Nandigram petition is still pending in the Supreme Court.
In a parallel development, the Supreme Court on Tuesday postponed the hearing on a TMC petition challenging Assembly Speaker Rathendra Nath Bose’s decision to recognize a group of 58 rebel TMC MLAs as opposition with ousted leader Ritabrata Banerjee as Leader of Opposition (LoP).
On June 3, Bose recognized 58 lawmakers from the rebel TMC as the main opposition group in the 294-member House of Representatives.
On June 1, Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandiban Saha were expelled from TMC after Adhikari said their written complaint led to a CID probe into the alleged signature forgery.
Read also:TMC’s Abhishek Banerjee questioned for 6 hours by CID in ‘provocative speech’ case
This development came 29 days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 207 seats against the TMC’s 80 seats.
The two lawmakers alleged that the signatures of several TMC MLAs were forged on the May 19 resolution nominating Subhandeep Chattopadhyay as Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. The spokesman then requested a police investigation into the matter. Abhishek Banerjee is one of the prime suspects as he sent the resolution to the Speaker. He was interrogated by the Criminal Investigation Department for 5.5 hours on June 11 and 8.5 hours on June 14.
On June 11, a single bench of Justice Krishna Rao heard the TMC’s plea and questioned the Speaker’s decision to recognize the expelled party member as MLA without the party’s approval. “The person appointed as a member of Qanun Party does not belong to any political party. He has been expelled,” the bench observed.
Seeking an interim stay of the Speaker’s order, Kalyan Banerjee argued before the court that the Speaker’s order violated the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution.
In response, the state’s Additional Advocate General (AAG) Bilawadhal Bhattacharya sought time to file an affidavit. The matter was put up for hearing on Tuesday but the hearing was postponed to Wednesday.
In another development on Tuesday, the Speaker of Parliament called a meeting of all parties in the House to determine the formalities for the next budget session starting on June 18.
Mamata Banerjee loyalist Kunal Ghosh, MLA from Beliaghata seat in Kolkata, claimed that neither he nor any TMC MLA were invited to attend the meeting.
“I did not receive any invitation. Senior party MLA Subhandeep Chattopadhyay, who was supposed to be the MLA as per our recommendation, was not invited. Instead, the expelled party member was invited as the MLA. The Speaker is not following constitutional rules,” he said.
The spokesman did not speak to the media.
Shankar Ghosh said the meeting was held as per rules. “All parties were invited according to the rules,” he said.
