News Brief
Trinamool Posts Good Show In All Three Seats In Bengal Bypolls; Mamata Credits Win To ‘Fears Over NRC’
- Seat won by BJP state president Dilip Ghosh in 2016 goes to Trinamool.
- Another was wrested from Congress and the third comfortably retained.
- It is a real loss of face for BJP, especially because some areas voted well for the party in the 2019 General Elections.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
The BJP has suffered humiliating losses in the bypolls to three Assembly seats in Bengal. The Trinamool, which has wrested Kharagpur Sadar from the BJP and Kaliaganj from the Congress while comfortably retaining Karimpur, has emerged as the clear winner.
Kharagpur Sadar has been a Congress bastion till BJP’s Dilip Ghosh won it in 2016 by a margin of 6,309 votes. Ghosh, who is also the state BJP president, got a 39.29 per cent vote share, up from 6.79 per cent that the party candidate got in the 2011 elections.
What is deeply disconcerting for the BJP is that in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, Kharagpur Sadar gave the party a lead of 27,000 votes. Ghosh had given up the seat after winning the Lok Sabha polls.
The Trinamool’s Pradip Sarkar defeated the BJP’s Prem Chadra Jha by an impressive margin of 20,811 votes. This is a severe loss of face for the BJP, especially its state president Ghosh, who was portrayed as the strongman of Kharagpur.
The Trinamool has also won the Kaliaganj seat for the first time. This Assembly seat in Uttar Dinajpur district bordering Bangladesh has also been a Congress citadel.
The Congress’ Pramatha Nath Roy won the seat in 2016 by defeating his nearest CPI(M) rival by 7,290 votes.
The BJP candidate from Kaliaganj had bagged just 3.68 per cent of the votes in 2016. Kaliaganj is part of the Raiganj Lok Sabha seat.
In the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, Kaliaganj had given the Raiganj BJP candidate Debashree Chaudhuri a whopping lead of over 51,000 votes.
Chaudhuri, who is now the Union Minister of State for Women and Child Development, had trounced the Trinamool candidate by over 60,000 votes. Thus, this defeat in Kaliaganj is also a deeply embarrassing one for the BJP.
In Kaliaganj, Trinamool’s Tapan Deb Sinha defeated the BJP’s Kamal Chandra Sarkar by 2,304 votes.
The bypolls was necessitated by the death of the sitting Congress MLA Pramatha Nath Roy. His daughter Dhitashree Roy, fielded jointly by the Congress and Left, came a poor third.
Karimpur in Nadia district bordering Bangladesh had been a CPI(M) stronghold till the Trinamool’s Mohua Moitra wrested it in 2016.
Moitra defeated her nearest CPI(M) by nearly 16,000 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Karimpur (part of Murshidabad Lok Sabha constituency) had the Trinamool’s Abu Taher Khan lead by over 14,000 votes.
Mohua Moitra vacated the seat after her election to the Lok Sabha from Nadia earlier this year.
The Trinamool’s Bimalendu Singha Roy is all set to bag the seat. At the time of filing this report, he had already established an unassailable lead of over 23,500 votes over the BJP’s Jay Prakash Majumder. Majumder is the vice-president of the party in Bengal.
A jubilant Mamata Banerjee attributed her party’s victories to panic created by the BJP with the NRC and the saffron party’s arrogance.
“It is a victory against BJP’s arrogance and desperation to come to power. We have received votes from Bengalis and non-Bengalis as well,” she said.
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