Police detain Humayun Kabir in Rejinagar after he votes and accuses officers of taking sides

Police detained Humayun Kabir in Rejinagar on Tuesday, shortly after he voted with his family in the assembly bypoll he himself made necessary. The Aam Janata Unnayan Party chief had spent the morning accusing officers of interfering at booths and of posting men outside his house. A row outside the party office turned into a scuffle. Officers pulled him by the shirt and put him in a vehicle, PTI reported from the spot. He had called the deployment "dalali", partisanship.

Kabir told ANI, before the detention, that the accusations had only just begun and that police were "hijacking the voting process at many booths". He asked why a government that was already in office needed to take votes that way. He also said 64 people from his camp had been detained over the past two months, and that the April election in the seat had been peaceful. "For the past 2 months, the police have been committing atrocities and launching attacks," he said. "They have detained 64 people, yet they are not satisfied."

Why this seat is empty

Kabir won both Rejinagar and Nowda in the 2026 assembly election and kept Nowda. Rejinagar, in Murshidabad, therefore needed a bypoll. AJUP has fielded his son, Golam Nabi Azad. The ballot also carries BJP nominee Sakharav Sarkar, a former Murshidabad district president; Trinamool candidate Rabiul Alam Chowdhury; a rival Trinamool name, Safiuzzaman Sheikh; Congress nominee Mohammad Abdullahil Kafi; and the CPI(M)'s Syed Asad Ali. Counting is on Friday, the same day as the other bypolls in this round, including Nagaon.

The double win is the structural fact. A candidate who takes two seats and resigns one hands his party a bypoll it must fund and police, and hands his son, in this case, a seat the father has just shown can be won. It also gives every rival a short campaign against a family name rather than against a sitting MLA. Kabir's detention on polling day folds a law-and-order incident into that family ticket.

The other vacancy on the same day

Rejinagar is not the only house seat voting because a winner kept a different chair. In Nandigram the vacancy opened after Suvendu Adhikari, who won both Nandigram and Bhabanipur, kept Bhabanipur. The two bypolls are legally separate. Politically they rhyme. In both, a leader who took two mandates chose one and left the other to a follower or a relative, and in both the campaign has been fought as a verdict on that choice. Kabir's morning argument with the police gives Rejinagar a scene Nandigram did not have by mid-morning.

Murshidabad is a district the state police already treat as sensitive. Kabir has spent the pre-poll weeks attacking the deployment near his residence and at booths, which is why officers were at the party office once the remarks continued after he had voted. A detention for a polling-day row is not a conviction. It does remove the party's main speaker from the gate for the hours when agents still file complaints. His son remains the name on the AJUP ballot.

What Friday will and will not settle

Friday's count will say who takes Rejinagar. It will not say whether 64 people were held over two months, or whether any booth was interfered with. Those claims sit in Kabir's interviews and, so far, not in a published police tally. The detention itself is on camera. The shirt, the vehicle, the office gate: that sequence is the verified event of Tuesday morning. The hijacking allegation is his, made to ANI, and unanswered in detail by the district police in the reports filed by early afternoon.

For AJUP the risk is practical. A party built around one MLA needs that MLA free to move on polling day, and needs the booth agents he named to stay at their tables. A detention after the vote is less damaging than a detention before it, which is the small mercy in the timing. He had already cast his ballot. The argument was about other people's ballots. Friday will show whether his son's vote held without him at the gate.