The Bharatiya Janata Party took its campaign over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls onto the streets of central Kolkata on Monday, November 2, with party national president Nitin Nabin leading the 'Loktantra Bachao, Arajakta Hatao' (Save Democracy, Remove Anarchy) padyatra from College Street to the Esplanade-Dharmatala area, a distance of a little over two kilometres.
Source: UrbanAcres
Nabin marched alongside West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari and state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya. The march was organised as a counter-mobilisation a day after the opposition INDIA bloc protested at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan against the SIR exercise and demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
Source: ANI via APNA MA TV
Addressing the gathering, Adhikari defended SIR as a vital step to weed out illegal immigrants from the rolls, saying, in the party's slogan, that SIR means 'Ghuspetiya Bhagao, Bharat Bachao' — drive out infiltrators, save India. He alleged that the INDIA bloc's constituents had united only to evade corruption probes, protect family-centric dynasties and pursue appeasement politics — allegations the opposition parties reject. He also said the BJP was elected in Bengal in 2026 with over 2 crore 92 lakh votes.
Source: ANI via APNA MA TV
Nabin said the BJP would not tolerate what he described as 'intruders' on voter rolls and accused the Congress, Rahul Gandhi and former chief minister Mamata Banerjee of benefiting electorally from such votes. Bhattacharya said people in the state had no grievance with SIR and that opposition criticism was made for the sake of opposing, and he called for a fresh revision in Bengal, claiming as many as 30 lakh names could be deleted if it were carried out — a figure the report carrying his remarks noted had no independent confirmation.
Source: UrbanAcres
Adhikari tied the voter-roll fight directly to the forthcoming Kolkata and Howrah municipal corporation elections, saying the BJP would give its opponents a fitting reply there and claiming that voters had erased the 'naam and nishan' (name and sign) of the Trinamool Congress. Nabin, addressing the end of the march, targeted Rahul Gandhi and said that after a 'Mamata-free' Bengal, Delhi too needed to be freed from Rahul, according to reports of the rally.
Source: Mirror Now
Roads along the route were shut and barricaded for the procession, disrupting movement in the dense central district; one report described a woman asking police to let her cross towards Medical College Hospital, where a relative had been admitted. Adhikari said more than 25,000 people attended the rally, though no independent estimate of the crowd was reported. What happens next turns on the civic-poll campaign in Kolkata and Howrah, where both sides have now made the voter-roll revision their central issue.