Just a day after the Election Commission sent notice to the BJP candidate Priyanka Tibrewal, acting on a Trinamul complaint, for violating the poll code by gathering a large number of supporters while filing her nomination, the BJP today complained to the EC, alleging that chief minister Mamata Banerjee violated Covid norms during campaigning for Bhawanipore bypoll.

As the Bhawanipore polling date nears, the TMC and the BJP have resorted to a tit for tat policy by lodging complaints against each other’s candidates with the election body.

Miss Banerjee, also the Trinamool Congress supremo, is contesting from Bhabanipur where a by-election will be held on 30 September. In a letter to the EC, Sajal Ghosh, the chief election agent of BJP candidate for the constituency, Priyanka Tibrewal, claimed that Banerjee, during a visit to a Gurudwara on Wednesday, was accompanied by a large number of supporters in violation of norms.

“On 15 September, the TMC candidate violated the Covid guidelines and Model Code of Conduct while visiting the Bhawanipur Gurudwara,” Ghosh said in his letter to the Returning Officer for the assembly segment. Her supporters also flouted Covid norms by not wearing masks and they did not use sanitiser, he claimed.

The TMC dubbed the allegations as “baseless and politically motivated”. This development also comes in the wake of a BJP delegation approaching the EC with a request to remove state transport minister and Kidderpole MLA Firhad Hakim from Miss Banerjee’s campaigns in Bhawanipore. The delegation has alleged that Mr Hakim has been intimidating the voters.

Meanwhile, BJP candidate Priyanka today kicked up controversy through her statements to the media. While reacting to the EC notice sent to her, she told media persons that she receives hundreds of such notices and tears up two hundred of them.

Her comment caused a flutter in the BJP state unit as the party’s spokesperson Jai Prakash Majumder sought to clarify that the party by no means have any intensions of disrespecting the election body. He, however, refused to make  any direct comment on Priyanka’s alleged “defiance” and said that it is difficult to say in what context she made the remark.