There have been claims of a truck being illegally intercepted; questions about why a truck travelling from Kolkata to New Delhi took a route passing through Haryana; fingerpointing over the costs of road vs air transport; and allegations of police being misused for party work.

The TMC is far from the first to do the paper chase. The AIADMK went through this in 2017, with 10 lakh affidavits in total submitted by the E Palaniswami and O Panneerselvam factions, as per an ECI statement. The Shiv Sena’s split in 2023 was an even more elaborate exercise, with the Uddhav Thackeray faction alone claiming to have submitted 23 lakh affidavits.…