Mamata vowed to expose the conspiracy allegedly hatched by the Election Commission at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to disenfranchise a large number of voters of West Bengal to ensure advantage for the saffron party in the forthcoming assembly polls in the state.

Abhishek Banerjee, the general secretary of the TMC, called for a social and political boycott of the BJP in West Bengal.

"Many people have been declared dead by the SIR during the SIR, but they are alive and are sitting here. I will bring them to the stage," she said at the beginning of the protest, pointing at some people near the podium. "The BJP and its agents in the EC have shamelessly crossed all limits".

The Chief Minister said that she would elaborate on the issue on Saturday. She may spend the night at the site of the protest itself, according to the TMC leaders.

"Obsessed with their fascist fever dream of 'One Nation, One Man, One Party', these Bangla-Birodhi Zamindars (Anti-Bengal Landlords) are conspiring to rob Bengal's people of their sacred right to vote," said Mamata, adding: "We will not be erased by your deletions, your deceit, or your Delhi diktats. I will go to any length, fight every battle, to safeguard their rights and dignity. This is our solemn oath."

She said that the protest that started on Friday was just the beginning.

Abhishek recalled the 'No vote to BJP' campaign launched by some civil society organisations ahead of the 2021 assembly elections in 2021. "Today, we are calling upon the 10 crore people of West Bengal to boycott the BJP socially and politically," said the heir apparent of the TMC supremo.

The TMC supremo launched the sit-in protest against the EC at the Metro Channel in Esplanade in central Kolkata, the same venue where she had been on a 26-day hunger strike in December 2006 to protest the acquisition of farmland at Singur in Hooghly for the Tata Motors to build a Nano car manufacturing plant - an agitation that had helped her and her party end the Left Front's 34-year-long rule in West Bengal in 2011. She chose the politically symbolic venue to return to street agitation politics just before the proposed visit of the EC to Kolkata on Sunday and Monday to assess the preparations for the assembly polls.

Poet Joy Goswami and singer Kabir Suman were among the eminent people who joined Mamata at the site of the protest on Friday.

Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, along with the senior officials of the commission, will have a meeting with the representatives of the political parties of the state in Kolkata on Monday.

The schedules of the assembly elections in West Bengal and other states are likely to be declared by the middle of this month.

"They first deleted 58 lakh names when they issued the draft electoral roll at the end of the first phase of the SIR in December 2025. By February 28, the number rose to 63-64 lakh. Now, over 60 lakh voters have been placed under adjudication. That means more than 1.2 crore voters are affected," Avishek said on Friday.

"This cannot be a coincidence. BJP leaders had been saying it months before the SIR process started (that over one crore voters would be disenfranchised)."

Criticising Kumar for allegedly misbehaving with Mamata during a meeting at Nirvachan Sadan, the headquarters of the EC in New Delhi, last month, Kalyan Banerjee, a TMC member in the Lok Sabha, said that he would have cut the fingers of the Chief Election Commissioner that day itself, had he not been holding a constitutional post.

"We drove out the British Raj and framed a constitution that guarantees equal rights and the right to vote to every citizen. If that right is taken away, how can elections remain free and fair? We will fight this battle in every court," eminent lawyer Menaka Guruswamy, now a TMC candidate for the Rajya Sabha, said.