New Delhi: Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee landed in fresh trouble as the BJP has raised an objection against her candidature from the Bhabanipur constituency stating that she has failed to disclose certain criminal cases against her.
The BJP, in a letter, has highlighted five cases registered against Banerjee in Assam, and not in West Bengal, alleging that the TMC stalwart has not mentioned them in the affidavit submitted along with the nomination papers.
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Sajal Ghosh, the chief election agent of BJP candidate Priyanka Tibrewal, who is pitted against the incumbent chief minister also furnished related news article links to the Returning Officer of the Bhabanipur Assembly constituency, demanding that Banerjee's candidature hence be considered null and void.
The IPC sections under which Banerjee has been booked in the highlighted cases include Section 120B (criminal conspiracy), Section 153A (promoting enmity) and Section 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others).
The Assembly seat of Bhabanipur, tucked in the South Kolkata Lok Sabha constituency, the seat had scripted Mamata Banerjee's ascendency to the hustings of Bengal, both in 2011 and 2016. Banerjee is aware that things in Bhabanipur this time around are not as easy as they were in 2011 when she decimated the Left and had won by a whopping 49,936 votes from the seat.
Her victory margin was an enviable 21.91 per cent with a voter turnout of around 63.78 per cent. But, in 2016 her winning margin was slashed by nearly half. With a 66.83 per cent voter turnout, Mamata won by 25,301 votes, with a victory margin of 10.21 per cent. Though in both cases she was up against the traditional opposition of Bengal, the Congress, Mamata knows what she is up against in the next couple of weeks.
