By Ananya Sharma 
Kolkata, April 28: A political party held a press conference. Their spokesperson walked up to a microphone, looked into the cameras, and told a police officer deployed by the constitutional body that runs India’s elections that once the voting is done, nobody will be able to protect him.
Not a closed-door meeting. Not a quiet word passed through intermediaries. A press conference. On record.
Trinamool Congress state spokesperson Riju Dutta said it plainly: after the 4th, even the BJP won’t be able to save you.
He was talking about IPS officer Ajay Pal Sharma.
Who is This Man They Are Threatening?
Sharma did not come to Bengal looking for trouble. He was sent here by the Election Commission of India the same body that runs every election in this country, the same body whose authority every political party invokes when it suits them.
He is a 2011-batch IPS officer from the UP cadre, currently posted as Additional Commissioner of Police in Prayagraj. Back home in Uttar Pradesh, people call him an encounter specialist. The “dabang” tag follows him around. He trained as a dentist before clearing the civil services exam, which is the kind of detail that makes him harder to fit into a simple headline.
The Election Commission picked him and placed him at the top of a list of 11 additional police observers rushed into Bengal specifically for the second phase of polling. His posting: South 24 Parganas. One of the most politically sensitive districts in the state. Abhishek Banerjee’s backyard. TMC’s strongest ground.
That posting was not random.
What He Did That Set Everyone Off
Sharma started getting complaints almost immediately after landing in the district. Voters from Falta constituency were reaching him with the same story, repeated across different households: Jahangir Khan, the TMC candidate from Falta, was threatening people. Pressuring them. Making them feel that voting freely carried a cost.
Sharma decided he would go to Khan’s house and say something about it directly.
Simple enough, except it was not simple at all.
When his team tried to find the house, nobody would tell them where it was. Residents gave vague answers and looked the other way. The local police, as per DNA India’s reporting, were not exactly helpful either. A senior Election Commission observer, deployed to ensure free and fair voting, had to conduct what amounted to a search operation just to find out where a sitting TMC candidate lived in his own constituency.
They found the house eventually.
Jahangir Khan was not there.
Sharma spoke to the family and supporters who were standing inside. He did not soften it. “Repeated reports are coming in that you are putting pressure on the public,” he told them. “If I receive another complaint that any voter has been intimidated or threatened, I will take direct action. There will be no opportunity to regret it later.”
A second clip, which spread even faster on X, had him saying: “Don’t even dare to issue threats to people. I am warning goons like Jahangir. I will not spare even the biggest of goons if I receive a complaint.”
Then, before leaving, his team counted the police posted outside the gate. Jahangir Khan holds Y-category security. That means a maximum of ten policemen. There were fourteen. Four more than the law allows. Sharma called the district SP on the spot and demanded an explanation.
The video went everywhere. And that is when the press conference happened.
A Date Was Put on His Safety
Riju Dutta stood before reporters and framed it the way TMC has framed every inconvenient thing during this election: as a BJP conspiracy. The Election Commission, he said, had stopped being a neutral body and turned Bengal into a war zone at the BJP’s direction.
And then the warning. After the 4th meaning after polling concludes and the election machinery winds down and central forces return to their home states even the BJP will not be able to protect Ajay Pal Sharma.
Read that again slowly.
A spokesperson of the party that currently runs West Bengal stood at a press conference and told an IPS election observer that his safety has an expiry date tied to the election calendar.
This is not complicated language. It does not need interpretation. It is a ruling party telling a constitutional officer that the shield around him is temporary, and they are keeping track of when it comes off.
Mahua Moitra Also Stepped In
Dutta was not alone. TMC MP Mahua Moitra posted on X the same day, directing her words at Sharma. According to India TV Hindi’s coverage of her tweets, she told him to be careful about his “herogiri” his big-hero behaviour and made clear that Bengal has its ways of dealing with people who overstep.
She called him “Fair and Lovely babua” in one post mocking his appearance while signalling that she is not worried about him at all. In another, she wrote that Bengal is always Trinamool, almost as if the election result is already decided before a single vote is counted in the second phase.
None of Moitra’s posts addressed the voter complaints from Falta. None of them engaged with the question of why a candidate’s home had four extra armed police personnel beyond his legally permitted limit. The response was entirely about the man who noticed these things, not the things themselves.
The Party Also Dug Into His Past
TMC did not stop at warnings. The party put out a formal statement raising old allegations against Sharma a reported cash-for-postings scandal, and an FIR filed by a woman who alleged personal misconduct. As reported by Oneindia News, TMC argued that an officer carrying such a history had no business being handed election oversight duties in a sensitive district.
These are serious allegations if true and should be investigated through proper channels. But it is also worth noting the timing. None of this history was raised before Sharma showed up at Jahangir Khan’s door. It surfaced the moment he became a problem for the ruling party. That pattern is not unique to Bengal, but it is worth naming.
BJP Said Exactly What You Would Expect
The BJP took the video and ran with it hard. Their West Bengal unit shared the clip, described Sharma as Bengal’s Singham, and declared that nobody could stop this election from being the freest and fairest in fifty years. Party leaders defended him publicly and called TMC’s reaction a sign of panic.
They are not wrong that the reaction looks like panic. They are also not neutral observers. Every BJP statement about Sharma is simultaneously a statement about the party’s own electoral interests. Both things can be true at the same time.
Akhilesh Yadav Also Spoke Up Against Sharma
Here is the part that cuts across party lines in a way that is genuinely interesting. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, whose party governs Uttar Pradesh alongside BJP in the NDA coalition, came out against Sharma. He called him an “agent of BJP’s agenda” and warned, according to Aaj Tak, that these officers would be hunted down and held accountable regardless of where they hide.
“We will neither let them run away, nor let them go underground,” Akhilesh said. “They will be found, dug out, and will face legal punishment.”
Akhilesh has his own reasons to take shots at BJP-linked officers he is the opposition chief minister of UP and every controversy involving the state cadre lands partly on his political doorstep. Still, the fact that a national opposition leader from Uttar Pradesh is essentially amplifying a Bengal ruling party’s threat against a UP police officer says something about how tangled this has become.
What The Election Commission Has Not Done
The ECI has said its observers are under instructions to maintain strict vigilance. What it has not done, at least publicly, is respond to the fact that a state spokesperson of the ruling party issued what amounts to a post-election threat against one of its serving officers.
No notice. No explanation sought. No statement.
Maybe something is happening behind closed doors. Maybe the Commission is choosing not to escalate in the final hours before polling. But the silence is noticeable. When Sharma issued his warning to Jahangir Khan’s family, TMC filed complaints and held press conferences within hours. When TMC’s spokesperson issued a warning to Sharma, the Commission has so far said nothing on record.
That asymmetry is not a small thing.
The People Nobody Is Talking About
Here is what actually matters and is being almost completely buried under the political theatre.
In Falta, some voters watched this entire episode play out on their phones. They saw a central observer arrive, warn a local strongman’s family, and then get threatened by the ruling party at a press conference. They are now supposed to wake up tomorrow morning, walk to their local polling booth, hand over their voter ID, and cast a free and fair vote.
These are people whose names the TMC’s local workers already know. People who live in the same neighbourhood as Jahangir Khan’s supporters. People who do not have Y-category security, or any security at all.
The message Riju Dutta’s press conference sent was not really aimed at Ajay Pal Sharma. Sharma is a trained officer with institutional backing, a national profile after this week, and a home state to return to. The message was aimed at those voters. It was telling them that the man standing between them and intimidation today is going away after the 4th, and the people he confronted are staying right here.
That is the oldest election threat in the book. It just rarely gets delivered from a podium, with a spokesperson’s name on it, in front of cameras.
The Day After Tomorrow
Voting begins in 142 constituencies across West Bengal on April 29. Falta is one of them. Whatever happens at those booths however many people show up, however freely they vote, however clean or chaotic the day turns out to be this press conference is now part of the record.
Ajay Pal Sharma will do his job tomorrow. The Election Commission’s machinery will be on the ground. Central forces will be posted at sensitive locations.
And then the election will end. The observers will go home. The central forces will board their trains.
And in Falta, the counting will still be days away, and Jahangir Khan’s people will still be there.
Riju Dutta said out loud what usually stays unsaid. That, at minimum, deserves to be written down and remembered.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
