While Mamata Banerjee camped at the Bhowanipore vault on Thursday night, Suvendu Adhikari visited the venue on Friday
KOLKATA: The Trinamool Congress and the BJP on Friday exchanged allegations regarding the security of EVM vaults as CM Mamata Banerjee’s party delegation met Election Commission officials to demand answers over the alleged CCTV blackout and opening of sealed rooms without party representatives.The BJP dismissed the complaints as a desperate search for “excuses” by a party on the brink of defeat, setting the stage for a tense May 4 vote-counting day.The most pointed allegation came from TMC’s Shyampukur candidate Shashi Panja, who told reporters after meeting EC officials that her party had “reasons to suspect” that someone was caught on camera entering the vault of Khudiram Anusilan Kendra in central Kolkata.“In the footage from Camera 17, we noticed people inside the vaults, which were cordoned off in the presence of our agents. “If you open the door, all political parties need to be informed of this,” Panja said. She said pink postal ballot envelopes could be seen in the video and that no party representatives were present when the seal was opened.Panja also questioned the EC’s statement that all parties had received emails regarding the sorting of postal votes scheduled for Thursday at 4 pm. “If there had been people on both sides, we wouldn’t have said anything. No one was there. So why did you break the seal and open that particular room?” she said. “The situation became a bit alarming when we at TMC noticed human activity there.”Panja, Mayor Firhad Hakim and Councilor Achim Bose also sought from the EC a comprehensive report on the alleged CCTV malfunctions in vaults across Bengal, unabridged and unedited recordings and detailed logs of all outage periods, and unrestricted access to surveillance sources by authorized representatives.Before visiting the EC office, Mamata met TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee at her home in Kalighat. The night before, she had camped at the Bhowanipore EVM safe room, triggering protests by the BJP that eventually led to an altercation with TMC members and supporters.Mamata and Abhishek held an emergency online meeting with the TMC at 4 pm on Saturday to count the agents for all 291 seats.State Opposition Leader Suvendu Adhikari, who is also the BJP candidate from Bhowanipore, posted a CCTV photo of the area outside the vault of Sakhawat Memorial School in south Kolkata on hisSuvendu visited the vault on Friday night, saying it was a “routine job” that did not require cameras to follow him.The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Dilip Ghosh was blunt. “TMC is now certain that it will fail. They are trying to divert focus by staying in the vault. They are complaining about everything. This is a clear sign that TMC is being defeated,” he claimed. Ghosh accused the TMC of deploying goons to rig the polls.
