By Ananya Sharma 
Kolkata, April 29: It started with a video. Not a dramatic one, no chaos, no shouting, nobody being dragged out. Just a quiet clip from inside a polling booth at Harindanga High School in Falta, South 24 Parganas, showing what appeared to be a strip of tape placed squarely over the BJP button on an EVM. That was it. And somehow, that small, almost mundane image turned into one of the ugliest political controversies of West Bengal’s 2026 assembly election day.
By the time most of Bengal had finished its morning tea, the clip was everywhere.
A Booth, A Button, A Strip of Tape
Falta falls under the Diamond Harbour constituency Abhishek Banerjee’s political backyard, for those keeping track. The booth in question was Falta 144 Part 170, Room No. 2, inside Harindanga High School. A second booth, number 189, was flagged shortly after with what BJP described as a similar problem.
BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya was among the first to push the video into national circulation, sharing it on X with a pointed post that named specific booth numbers, demanded immediate repolling, and connected the dots loudly to what he called the Diamond Harbour Model. His framing was direct: this was not an accident. It was, he alleged, a deliberate method of voter suppression that had, in his telling, already helped Abhishek Banerjee retain his Lok Sabha seat in 2024.
As reported by ANI and Business Standard, Malviya wrote that in several polling booths the option to vote for the BJP had been blocked using tape, effectively preventing voters from exercising their choice. He did not hedge much. The post named rooms, schools, booth numbers the kind of specificity that is harder to dismiss than a vague claim.
The TMC candidate in Falta this time around is Jehangir Khan, a figure the BJP has gone out of its way to describe in unflattering terms. On the other side is BJP’s Debangshu Panda. It is a contest the party has been watching closely, in a seat it badly wants to crack open.
What the Tape Actually Means
Here is why this particular incident cuts through the usual noise of Bengal election complaints. India has had its share of EVM controversies over the years allegations of software manipulation, machine hacking, remote tampering. These claims are technically complex, almost impossible to verify in real time, and easy for authorities to deflect with references to encryption protocols and engineering certifications.
This was different. This was tape. Ordinary adhesive tape. Visible to anyone who walked up to the machine. No technical expertise needed to understand what it meant: press the BJP button and either nothing happens, or the vote registers elsewhere. Walk away confused. Or walk away having voted for someone you did not choose.
The mechanism, if the video is genuine, is brutally simple. That simplicity is part of what made the image so difficult to look away from.
The Election Commission Steps In Conditionally
West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal told PTI that repolling was likely in booths where EVMs were found to have been tampered with or covered in any way. The State Election Commissioner also weighed in, saying all such reports would be verified and that affected booths would be sent for repoll if the claims held up.
That response measured, conditional, careful was about as much as anyone expected in the middle of a polling day. The commission was not going to assign blame without verification. Standard protocol. Still, the fact that senior poll officials were publicly acknowledging the possibility of repolling while voting was still underway says something about the weight they gave the evidence in front of them.
As of midday, no formal repolling order had come through. Verification, they said, was ongoing.
The Rest of the Day Was No Quieter
Phase 2 across 142 seats was already a tense affair before the Falta video surfaced. In Nadia district, as reported by Republic World, tensions boiled over between TMC and ISF workers, with police making arrests. At Ramchandrapur, BJP and TMC polling agents clashed inside a booth before things were brought under control. Voting resumed, but the atmosphere did not exactly settle.
BJP candidate Bikash Sardar from Basanti alleged that a mob of 200 to 250 TMC workers attacked his vehicle, going after his driver with rods and bamboo sticks. In Panihati, Ratna Debnath the BJP candidate who is also the mother of the junior doctor killed at RG Kar Medical College alleged that TMC workers used abusive language and tried to physically intimidate her during polling. Her father alleged separately that security forces were not intervening.
At Bhabanipur, where Mamata Banerjee herself is contesting, Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari showed up to inspect a booth and walked straight into a tense standoff with TMC supporters raising slogans against him. He responded with chants of Jai Shri Ram and claims about Bangladeshi Muslims predictably raising the temperature further.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, for her part, spent part of the day levelling her own complaints against central paramilitary forces and poll authorities, whom she accused of biased conduct. NIA officials were deployed at seven sensitive seats, including Kasba, Bhangar, and Baruipur, following an Election Commission request tied specifically to fears of bomb-related disruptions. That alone tells you something about the ground reality.
Through all of it, voters kept coming. A turnout of roughly 61 per cent was recorded by 1 pm, climbing to 78.68 per cent by 3 pm, according to The Federal and India TV News. Whatever else was happening outside the booths, a large number of people clearly intended to vote.
Why Falta Keeps Coming Up
Diamond Harbour is not just any constituency. It is Abhishek Banerjee territory the segment where TMC’s second-most powerful figure has built his political identity. Falta sits inside it. Any crack in that electoral architecture would carry symbolic weight well beyond the seat’s actual vote count.
That is part of why the BJP chose to frame this so sharply. The tape video gave them something concrete at a moment when most election-day complaints violence allegations, booth intimidation, EVM malfunction claims tend to blur into each other. A video of tape on a button does not require interpretation. It is its own argument.
Whether that argument will translate into formal action repolling, cancellation, any accountability for what was shown in that clip depends entirely on what the Election Commission’s verification process finds. The commission has committed to acting if the evidence holds. That commitment will now be measured against what actually happens next.
The Larger Picture
Bengal elections have carried a reputation for violence and alleged manipulation for a long time now. That is not a partisan observation it has been documented across governments, across parties, and across decades. What 2026 has added to that history is a media and social media environment that can transmit a clip from Harindanga High School to a national audience in minutes.
That speed changes the political calculus. It does not automatically mean justice is faster. But it makes the footage harder to bury, the denial harder to sustain, and the pressure on the Election Commission harder to ignore.
For the BJP, the tape video is their sharpest exhibit from this election day. For the TMC, the absence of an official response by midday left the narrative space entirely to the opposition. For voters in Falta those who made it to the booth, found an open button, and managed to cast what they hoped was a free vote the waiting now begins.
The count will come. The questions around that booth at Harindanga High School may take longer to answer.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
Prakash Nair