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Kolkata, May 6:

Alleging that the West Bengal assembly poll verdict was “not a people’s mandate but a conspiracy”, a defiant TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday refused to resign as chief minister, opening up a constitutional grey zone and a political confrontation in the state.

A day after the BJP sealed a landslide victory with 207 seats in the 294-member assembly, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule, Banerjee dismissed the outcome as “engineered” and asserted that her party was fighting the Election Commission, not the BJP. The TMC could only manage 80 seats.

“Why should I step down? We have not lost. The mandate has been looted. Where does the question of resignation arise?” she said, doubling down on her refusal to vacate the office.

“The question of my resignation does not arise, as we were defeated not by a public mandate but by a conspiracy. I did not lose, I will not go to Lok Bhavan,” she asserted at a packed press conference, her tone oscillating between grievance and combativeness.

Banerjee alleged large-scale irregularities in counting, claiming nearly 100 seats were “looted” and that the pace of counting was deliberately slowed to sap her party’s morale.

“We were not fighting the BJP; we were fighting the Election Commission, which was working for the BJP. I have never seen such an election in my entire political career,” she said.