Kolkata: Prashant Kishor makes his debut on Bhowanipore voter rolls

KOLKATA: A voter of St Helen’s School in ‘159’ Bhowanipore assembly constituency whose details surfaced on social media on Saturday night may have political ramifications beyond Bengal. The voter’s name is Prashant Kishor.
According to local sources, Kishor’s Kolkata address is 121 Kalighat Street, not far from chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s 30B Harish Chatterjee Street home and Abhishek Banerjee’s home on Harish Mukherjee Road.
The Kalighat Street address was home to Abhishek till he shifted out to where he stays now. It still has a small hardware store named after Abhishek.
Incidentally, sources claimed Kishor had applied to be a Bhowanipore voter much before Bengal assembly polls, which concluded in May. “This is not new. He had become a voter in March. He was a Bhowanipore voter when elections were held here on April 27,” said a Trinamool Congress block functionary who is part of the party’s poll team in Bhowanipore. Kishor, however, did not vote.
Based on documents available on social media which haven’t been disputed till now, Kishor became a Bhowanipore voter during electoral roll revisions from January 15 to April 7. Kishor himself did not make any public statement on this.
Kishor is from Bihar before he shifted his work base to Kolkata after July 2019 to help Trinamool’s Bengal election campaign.
He has been part of several political campaigns after working with BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls but it is still not known whether he opted to be a voter in any place he worked.
Asked about it, CM Banerjee’s chief election agent in Bhowanipore Baishwanar Chattopadhyay said: “Bhowanipore has over 2 lakh voters. It is not possible immediately to say whether Kishor is among them. But for the sake of argument, what is wrong in it? He is an Indian citizen and can choose to vote from wherever he wants. This is his right.”
BJP took potshots at this, first tweeting the list of additions to Bhowanipore’s electoral rolls, with its media-in-charge Saptarshi Chowdhury asking whether Bengal’s daughter now needs an outsider to vote.
But it was former Tripura and Meghalaya governor Tathagata Roy who tweeted this could be part of a “design” to send Kishor to Rajya Sabha. Trinamool has one vacant seat in Rajya Sabha after the resignation of Arpita Ghosh on September 15.
BJP’s Bhowanipore candidate Priyanka Tibrewal’s chief election agent Sajal Ghosh quipped: “He isn’t an outsider any more but a local boy (ghorer chele).”
Kishor, who had said he was severing ties with I-Pac after the Bengal elections, had been in Delhi and met senior opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi. I-Pac is working closely with Trinamool in Bengal and Tripura campaigns, including the Bhowanipore bypoll.
On September 20, Kishor along with Abhishek had met CM Banerjee and then accompanied her to a Bhowanipore temple.