TMC's Jahangir 'Pushpa' Khan sent to 5-day police custody in EVM tampering case
A local court in West Bengal ordered a five-day police custody for Jahangir Khan, a former TMC strongman and an e aide of Abhishek Banerjee
A local court in West Bengal ordered a five-day police custody for Jahangir Khan, a former TMC strongman and an e aide of Abhishek Banerjee, who withdrew his name from the Falta repoll last month. According to sources, the local court turned down West Bengal Police’s initial plea for a 14-day remand. However, the court also explicitly instructed the investigating officer to file a fresh, separate application should the team need to take the accused outside the state or station for further investigation. Read Full Story Meanwhile, in a significant legal development, not a single lawyer from the Diamond Harbour Bar Association stepped forward to represent Khan, forcing the accused to formally request state-funded legal aid.
The court subsequently approved his request, assigning defence counsel from the official legal aid cell to represent him during the proceedings. The development came a day after the special task force (STF) of the West Bengal Police arrested Khan near the Nepal border in connection with multiple FIRs, including allegations of tampering with EVMs by applying tapes on BJP symbols on the EVMs in the South 24 constituency. The Election Commission took the drastic step of ordering a complete repoll in the Falta Assembly constituency just forty-eight hours before the final state election results were scheduled to be released.
While the election outcomes for the remaining 293 seats across West Bengal were successfully declared on May 4, the central poll body formally cancelled the initial voting in Falta, explicitly citing severe electoral offences and a direct subversion of the democratic process. This intervention followed rampant complaints of voter intimidation and targeted tampering with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), which included the physical blocking of opposition candidates' names on the voting units across multiple booths. Investigators also found that inadequate or missing CCTV footage made it completely impossible to verify the fairness of the original polling process. Meanwhile, Khan had previously made headlines by adopting the moniker 'Pushpa' in a direct, public challenge to the zero-tolerance stance of the designated police observer, Ajay Pal Sharma, who is widely known by the nickname 'Singham'.
The bitter rivalry erupted ahead of the polls when Sharma personally visited Khan's residence to warn his family members against intimidating voters on polling day, prompting Khan's defiant declaration that if the police observer was Singham, then he was Pushpa. Ends
The BriefWire