3 min readKolkataApr 26, 2026 02:01 AM IST
In an unprecedented incident, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee left in the middle of her speech during a public rally in her assembly seat in Bhabanipur. This was after noise, allegedly from a passing BJP rally, disturbed her. Chants of ‘chor’ (thief) could be heard from the rally.
The incident took place at night near the Swaminarayan temple on Chakraberia Road.
“See how they are shouting. All the media is here. It is insulting and humiliating. They are shouting because they don’t want me to hold the meeting. I beg your pardon. I will not be able to address you now. Tomorrow I will hold a rally here. I apologise and I will leave. Please vote for me in protest of this,” said a visibly disturbed Banerjee, who left the stage.
“Everyone saw what happened. How our chief minister was insulted. This will go against the BJP,” said Sovandeb Chatterjee, a senior TMC leader who was present at the public meeting.
“We have taken official permission to hold this meeting. I was away from Bhabanipur for about a month because I was campaigning for the entire Bengal. I was campaigning for about 200 seats, and Abhishek (Abhishek Banerjee, TMC All India general secretary and Lok Sabha MP) was also campaigning. I will take legal action against this,” said Banerjee before leaving the stage.
Earlier, during a BJP rally, Suvendu Adhikari, the party’s candidate for Bhabanipur, had alleged that TMC put up loudspeakers to disrupt his event.
The Bhabanipur Assembly seat, which falls within Kolkata, is set to see a showdown between Banerjee and Adhikari. Adhikari is also contesting from his home turf of Nandigram, where he had defeated Mamata by less than 2,000 votes in 2021.
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After the EC’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, a total of 51,000 voters were deleted from the rolls in Bhabanipur, amounting to 21% of its electorate. These deletions have put pressure on the TMC chief, whose victory margin in the 2021 by-election from Bhabanipur was about 58,800 votes. In the final lap of her statewide campaign, Mamata is set to focus on Bhabanipur, where, apart from holding meetings with TMC workers, she is expected to canvass at the grassroots level, which would be a first for her. In the cosmopolitan Bhabanipur, Mamata is expected to visit Jain temples and Sikh gurdwaras to attract non-Bengali voters. She has been holding padayatras and closed-door meetings with residents of high-rises, where there are considerable non-Bengali voters.
On the other hand, Amit Shah is camped in Bengal to oversee the BJP campaign. He too held a rally in Bhabanipur.
