Mamata Banerjee lost her own seat by roughly 15,000 votes on Sunday. On Monday, she held a press conference and said she wasn’t defeated.
She alleges EVMs were tampered with. She says goons entered the Bhabanipur counting centre, beat her, and manhandled her TMC agents the moment CCTV cameras went off. She says her party didn’t lose. Weeks before the vote, the Supreme Court ordered an NIA probe into Bengal’s election-bound lawlessness.
The numbers say otherwise: BJP 207, TMC 80 — in an assembly her party held with 215 seats five years ago. And she’s still Chief Minister. She’s just refused to resign.
The Numbers She’s Disputing
Suvendu Adhikari — the BJP leader who once ran her campaigns — won Bhabanipur, her stronghold seat. Sixty-three percent of her cabinet ministers also lost their individual constituencies. BJP’s vote share landed at 45.84%. TMC’s at 40.80%. Voter turnout hit 92.93% — the highest in West Bengal’s history, on the eve of Bengal’s two-phase election that had framed every one of these stakes.
This isn’t a thin margin to dispute. It’s a 130-seat swing in BJP’s favour from 2021, in a record turnout, on the same EVMs Mamata defended after her own 2021 sweep — and exit polls couldn’t agree on Bengal by 100+ seats, making the actual margin all the more stark.
Which makes her refusal less a constitutional question and more a constitutional clock.
What Article 164 Actually Says
Under Article 164, a Chief Minister and her cabinet hold office “during the pleasure of the Governor.” Election results don’t auto-dismiss a government — but they don’t have to. The Governor has full discretion to dismiss a CM who’s lost the mandate.
The 17th West Bengal Assembly’s term expires on May 7. Two days from today.
If Mamata doesn’t resign, the Governor can dismiss her, invite the BJP legislative leader to form government with 207 seats, and ask him to prove a majority on the floor. There is no scenario in which a 207-seat majority is denied office because the outgoing CM disputes the count.
May 9, Rabindra Jayanti
BJP has scheduled its oath ceremony for May 9 — Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary. The choice is deliberate. Bengal’s most revered cultural figure, claimed by the first right-of-centre government the state has had since assembly polls began in 1937. PM Modi is expected to attend.
Mamata says she wasn’t defeated. The Constitution will tell her otherwise by Friday.