Bengal Assembly by-polls: TMC wins Kaliaganj and Kharagpur seats, surges in Karimpur

Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC)defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Kaliaganj assembly seat in North Dinajpur district in north Bengal and Kharagpur Sadar in West Midnapore district, winning both for the first time, in the by-election held on November 25.

At 12.40 pm on Thursday, the trend in counting of votes made it clear that TMC was all set to win the Karimpur seat in Nadia district as well. Many saw it as a victory for the party’s election strategist Prashant Kishor who emphasised on door-to-door campaign and local issues.

“This is proof of people’s faith in us. People have voted against BJP because the party they voted for at the national level are not asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens,” said chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

For the BJP, this was a humiliating position because Kharagpur is part of the Lok Sabha constituency where the party’s state president Dilip Ghosh had won a few moths ago. BJP had a margin of 45,000 votes in this assembly segment. Ghosh’s election agent Prem Chand Jha was the candidate for the assembly seat. While campaigning for Jha, who faces some criminal cases, Ghosh had said voters should consider that it was he who was the candidate.

In the Lok Sabha polls, BJP was ahead by 57,000 votes in the Kaliagunj assembly segment of the Raigunj Lok Sabha constituency that BJP’s Debasree Chaudhuri, now a Union minister of state, won with 40.06 per cent votes against TMC’s 35.32 per cent in the last election. “We lost because of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that our party has vowed to implemented across India. We did not get minority votes. We could not convince voters,” said the BJP candidate Kamal Chandra Sarkar.