- Thursday, February 27, 2025
In another incident, workers of an opposition party started a relay race with a ballot box after accusing the ruling TMC of rigging the election.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE recently held rural elections in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal saw massive violence resulting in many deaths and injuries but there were also other bizarre reasons for which the polls stole the headlines.
In the state’s North 24 Parganas district, a candidate of the opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) alleged that his rival from the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by chief minister Mamata Banerjee ate a bunch of ballot papers after he started trailing in the counting. While the allegation resulted in the counting process getting stopped, the TMC said there was no evidence to back such a charge.
The CPI(M) candidate, Rabindranath Majumdar, told the local media that he had won the election by just four votes and alleged that his opponent Mahadeb Mati entered the polling booth and picked up some ballot papers from the box and started chewing them, NDTV reported. He also allegedly threw some of the ballot papers around before leaving.
The administration was yet to announce the winner in that particular booth, the reports added.
In another bizarre incident related to the blood-stained poll, workers of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allegedly started a relay race with a ballot box in the northern district of Cooch Behar. They accused the ruling party of rigging the election and fled from the booth with the box. It changed hands as in a relay race, reports said, as villagers gave it a chase.
In a panchayat area near Kolkata, the state capital, TMC workers were accused of throwing a ballot box in a drain. In another booth, also in North 24 Parganas, a TMC worker jumped into a pond with a ballot box after predicting a loss for his party’s candidate in the election.
The TMC, however, swept the elections winning more than 2,500 gram panchayats (out of 3,300), 232 of 341 panchayat samitis and 12 out of 20 zilla parishads. The BJP of prime minister Narendra Modi came a distant second with only 212 gram panchayats, seven panchayat samitis and no zilla parishads.
Nearly 40 people have died from all contesting parties during the elections. Many more were injured.
