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West Bengal polls: Tough contest between TMC, BJP on 31 seats in phase 3
The polls will be held in Hooghly, South 24 Parganas and Howrah districts. The last two are located adjacent to Kolkata.
The 31 assembly seats that will go to the polls in the third phase in West Bengal on April 6 are likely to witness a tough battle between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because of the demographic character of some of the constituencies and strong presence of the ruling party.
The polls will be held in Hooghly, South 24 Parganas and Howrah districts. The last two are located adjacent to Kolkata.
In Hooghly district, where eight seats are slated to go to the polls, the BJP made sizeable inroads in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Actor-turned-politician Locket Chatterjee managed to wrest the Hooghly Lok Sabha seat while the BJP lost the Arambagh seat by about a thousand votes only. Chatterjee, who is one of the four BJP Lok Sabha members in the fray, is now contesting the Chinsurah assembly seat which is part of her Lok Sabha segment.
Swapan Dasgupta, the BJP’s Rajya Sabha member who resigned from the Parliament to contest the local elections, is contesting against the TMC’s Ramendu Singha at the Tarakeshwar seat in Hooghly district.
“It is now my responsibility to win the seat,” Dasgupta told the local media during a door-to-door campaign on Saturday.
In South 24 Parganas district, where as many as 16 assembly segments are going to the polls, several are part of the Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency held by chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee. The TMC’s youth wing president held five rallies and roadshows as campaigning came to a close at 5 pm on Sunday.
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In South 24 Parganas, many assembly segments, such as Canning East, Baruipur East, Baruipur West and Diamond Harbour, Muslims comprise a sizeable section of the population. While this may make the contest easier for the TMC, since Muslims have backed the party consistently, allegations of corruption during the distribution of relief items for victims of cyclone Amphan has been made the main election issue by the BJP and the Indian Secular Front founded by cleric Abbasuddin Siddiqui.
Mograhat East, Bishnupur, Mandirbazar, Joynagar, Basanti, Kultali and Canning West are reserved for scheduled caste candidates. In these seats, the Left parties had a strong presence till 2016 and the Marxists are desperate to make a comeback. At Raidighi, CPI(M) stalwart and former minister Kanti Ganguly is contesting the seat again.
In Howrah, where the TMC has a strong presence, only seven seats are going to the polls. Out of these, the BJP intends to put up a tough fight at Udaynarayanpur, Jagatballavpur, Uluberia North and Uluberia South.
Among the BJP’s other prominent candidates in the third phase are Debjit Sarkar, former president of the party’s youth wing in Bengal, and actress Tanushree Chakraborty who joined the saffron camp only days before her name was announced. While Sarkar is contesting the Jangipara seat in Hooghly, Chakraborty has been fielded from Shyampur in Howrah.
