Kolkata, Jan 27: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is likely to travel to New Delhi next week amid TMC’s protest over the ongoing SIR exercise, a development that has also led to the postponement of the tabling of the state’s interim budget to February 5, party and assembly sources said.
The schedule for the interim budget session of the 294-member West Bengal Legislative Assembly, which is due to go to the polls in about three months, has been officially revised, with the session now slated to begin on February 3 instead of January 31.
The vote-on-account budget, earlier scheduled to be presented on February 2, will now be tabled on February 5.
“The budget will now be tabled on February 5. The session will begin on February 3,” Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee told PTI.
The rescheduling comes as Banerjee is expected to visit the national capital, though the exact dates and itinerary of her travel have not yet been finalised.
According to party sources, the chief minister may travel to Delhi during the Parliament session, which would also provide her an opportunity to interact with leaders of other opposition parties.
Irrespective of the timing, party leaders said her central objective would be to take the West Bengal-specific political battle over SIR to the national stage.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls began in West Bengal on November 4, the same day Mamata Banerjee and TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee led a protest march through the streets of Kolkata.
Addressing a rally after the march, Abhishek had warned that the party would take the agitation to Delhi if even a single “genuine voter” was excluded from the rolls.
The TMC has since repeatedly reiterated that warning, accusing the Election Commission, in collusion with the BJP, of facilitating large-scale exclusion of legitimate voters under the guise of electoral roll revision.
Banerjee herself, party sources said, informed her close aides on Monday that she was preparing for a Delhi visit as part of the broader political push against SIR.
The party’s leadership believes that Banerjee’s presence in Delhi would significantly raise the political temperature around the issue, particularly in the backdrop of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections.
In October 2023, when TMC workers staged protests in Delhi under Abhishek Banerjee’s leadership over the alleged denial of central funds to the state, police action against demonstrators had triggered sharp political reactions.
With the Delhi Police functioning under the Union Home Ministry headed by Amit Shah, the TMC feels Banerjee’s participation in any protest would make administrative handling of such demonstrations far more sensitive.
TMC leaders have also been arguing that alleged irregularities by the Election Commission during polls in Bihar, Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi helped the BJP secure victories, claiming that opposition parties there failed to counter the “manipulation”.
“In West Bengal, we have identified the game — deletion of names of genuine voters and inclusion of bogus ones. We caught it booth-by-booth,” a senior TMC leader said.
Party insiders further said that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had previously demonstrated alleged vote theft using projectors while briefing opposition leaders, but TMC was the only party to translate that narrative into grassroots action.
The TMC believes that taking this argument to Delhi could help it consolidate its position within the broader anti-BJP opposition space at the national level.
Banerjee has repeatedly asserted both publicly and in closed-door meetings that she would not allow the removal of “legitimate voters” from the electoral rolls and would also oppose, what she described as “harassment of ordinary citizens”, in the name of verification.
Meanwhile, political attention in the state is firmly focused on the vote-on-account budget. There is heightened public curiosity over whether Banerjee will announce any major welfare measures.
Going by convention, state budgets are usually presented within a week of the Union Budget. With Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman set to table the Union Budget for the 2026-27 fiscal on February 1, the West Bengal government has scheduled its budget session for the first week of February. (Agencies)
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