Mamata Banerjee Visits Strongroom Amid EVM Claims

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee visited a strongroom in Kolkata's Bhabanipur constituency late Thursday night amid allegations by her Trinamool Congress party of electronic voting machine tampering following the second phase of assembly elections, though election officials firmly rejected the claims as baseless.

Banerjee arrived at Sakhawat Memorial School around 8:15 p.m. and remained inside for nearly four hours, accompanied by her election agent. She later told reporters outside that she had gone to check on complaints of irregularities, including footage from other sites showing outsiders handling postal ballots. "I was here to keep a vigil. Our EVMs are here," she said. "Initially, they stopped us, but later the returning officer allowed me to enter." Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim, a TMC candidate from a nearby seat, also reached the site but was not permitted inside.

Tensions simultaneously flared in north Kolkata, where TMC candidates Kunal Ghosh and Shashi Panja staged a sit-in protest outside Khudiram Anushilan Kendra near Netaji Indoor Stadium. They claimed suspicious activity inside, including the handling of postal ballots without party representatives...