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TMC, BJP gear up for bypolls at Bengal assembly seats won by turncoats
TMC chairperson Mamata Banerjee started her preparations on Tuesday by calling a meeting of leaders from the Kolkata North Lok Sabha segment
The bypolls to be held at four assembly seats in West Bengal on July 10 has prompted both Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to prepare for a tough battle since three of these constituencies were wrested by the saffron camp in the last 2021 state elections but the winners, who had switched over from the ruling party, changed camps again after securing the seats.
The turncoat legislators, Krishna Kalyani from the Raiganj seat, Mukutmani Adhikari from Ranaghat South and Biswajit Das from Bagdah resigned from the legislative assembly before the recent Lok Sabha elections to contest the Raiganj, Ranaghat and Bongaon seats, respectively, but were defeated by BJP.
Although the saffron camp’s 2019 Lok Sabha tally of 18, a record, came down to 12, it won these three seats twice in a row.
Dalit Matua community leader Shantanu Thakur, the two-term winner from Bongaon, has been made Union minister of state for shipping for the second time.
In 2021, BJP secured 75 of Bengal’s 294 assembly segments.
The fourth poll-bound assembly seat, Manicktala in Kolkata, fell vacant because of the death of TMC’s veteran legislator and minister Sadhan Pandey. In the Lok Sabha polls, TMC was ahead of BJP in this assembly segment, which is part of the Kolkata North seat that the ruling party’s Sudip Bandopadhyay retained for the fourth time.
On Monday, hours after the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the assembly bypolls in Bengal and also at nine seats in Punjab, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, TMC wrote to the ECI that these elections could have been held later since six more Bengal assembly seats will fall vacant as the incumbent TMC MLAs have won the Lok Sabha polls.
Although election records in India show that bypolls in most cases are won by a state’s ruling party, TMC chairperson Mamata Banerjee started her preparations on Tuesday by calling a meeting of leaders from the Kolkata North Lok Sabha segment. Supti Pandey, wife of the deceased legislator from Manicktala, also attended the closed-door meeting.
Amid wide speculation that Supti might be fielded from her husband’s seat, TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said: “The top leadership takes these decisions. The party will announce all candidates at the right time.”
Since it was not clear whether TMC will field Krishna Kalyani, Mukutmani Adhikari and Biswajit Das from the seats, they earlier represented, all three said they will abide by the party’s decision.
“The party may decide not to field me. I will obey every order Mamata Banerjee gives,” said Das.
Meanwhile, BJP workers started painting wall graffiti across the Bagdah constituency on Tuesday without naming any candidate.
According to BJP leaders, support of the Matua community, which is part of the scheduled caste (SC) population, the scheduled tribe (ST) voters and people from other backward classes (OBCs) helped BJP retain the Raiganj, Ranaghat and Bongaon Lok Sabha seats this year. The poll-bound assembly segments were secured by BJP as well.
The Matuas are a part of the large Dalit Namasudra community that migrated from East Pakistan during Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War to escape religious persecution. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was enforced in March, was promised to them by BJP in 2019.
“Whatever theory people may have about byelections, BJP is going to capture not only the three assembly seats we won in 2019 but also the Manicktala seat in Kolkata. People who closely followed the Lok Sabha polls will support us,” Bengal BJP’s chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said.
