Bypolls in Bhabanipur, Samserganj, Jangipur and Pipili to be held today
Tight security arrangements have been made for these bypolls. The most high-profile contest is in Bhabanipur from where chief minister Mamata Banerjee is contesting. Votes polled on Thursday will be counted on October 3.
Bypolls will be held in three seats in West Bengal - south Kolkata's Bhabanipur, Samserganj and Jangirpur in Murshidabad district - and Pipili in Odisha on Thursday. The most high profile contest of these will be in Bhabanipur from where chief minister Mamata Banerjee is contesting as the Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate.
The election is being held at the time of heavy rain in the region due to the effect of Cyclone Gulab. The Election Commission has directed all polling stations to keep pumps ready to drain out floodwaters.
Prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) have been imposed within 200 metres of the polling centres.
The polling will begin at 7am and continue till 6pm.
The Bhabanipur bypoll was necessitated following the resignation of TMC MLA Sovandeb Chattopadhyay so that the party chief can contest from the seat which Banerjee won in 2011 and 2016 elections.
In the assembly election held earlier this year, Banerjee, a resident of the Bhabanipur constituency, contested from Nandigram, against her former protege-turned-adversary Suvendu Adhikari of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in his home turf.
Though she powered the TMC to a resounding win for a third straight term in office, she lost to Adhikari by a narrow margin.
Banerjee now must win the by-poll to ensure an unbroken stint as the chief minister. She is facing BJP's Priyanka Tibrewal and CPI(M)'s Srijib Biswas.
Polling will also be held in Samserganj today. It could not go to polls on April 26 - when the seventh of the eight-phase assembly election in Bengal was held - because Rezaul Haque, the Congress candidate died of Covid-19 in early April.
The seat was won by TMC’s Amirul Islam in 2016. He is pitted against Congress' Jaidur Rahaman and CPI(M)’s Mohammad Modassar Hossain. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fielded Milan Ghosh, a debutant.
The Jangipur assembly seat is set to witness a triangular contest. The seat is part of the Jangipur Lok Sabha constituency. Late former President Pranab Mukherjee won the Lok Sabha seat in 2004 and 2009. His son, Abhijit Mukherjee, who joined the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in July, represented the seat in Parliament twice. The TMC wrested the Jangipur Lok Sabha seat in 2019.
TMC has fielded Jakir Hossain, a former state minister who bagged the Jangipur assembly seat in 2016, for the by-poll. Sujit Das is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and Jane Alam Mian is that of RSP.
Jangipur has been traditionally known as a Congress bastion. Congress has held the seat 11 times since 1951. It left the assembly segment for the RSP as part of an alliance for the March-April polls.
More than five months after the by-poll was countermanded, the Pipili assembly constituency in Odisha’s Puri district is finally set to go for the election on Thursday amid tight security.
The bypoll was necessitated after its sitting Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MLA Pradip Maharathy succumbed to Covid-19 in October 2020. The bypoll scheduled on April 17 had to be postponed after the demise of Congress candidate Ajit Mangaraj just three days before the election was to happen.
The bypoll was again rescheduled to May 16 after Congress fielded Bishwokeshan Harichandan Mohapatra as their candidate. However, on May 4, the Election Commission deferred the bypoll as the state went into Covid-19 lockdown amid rising cases.
Tight security arrangement
Seventy two companies of central forces have been deployed in three constituencies of West Bengal, of which 35 have been sent to Bhabanipur alone, a polling official said on Wednesday. Three personnel will man each of the 287 booths at the 97 polling centres in Bhabanipur, the official added.
Strict security arrangements have also been made in Jangipur and Samserganj, the official further said. There are 363 booths in Jangipur and 329 in Samserganj.
In Odisha's Pipili, nine platoons (each platoon comprises 30 personnel) of Border Security Force (BSF) and 25 platoons of state armed police force apart from general police have been put on duty for the by-election, Puri Superintendent of Police K V Singh said on Wednesday.
Of the 348 polling booths in Pipili, 201 have been declared as "sensitive" of which 102 are "hypersensitive", he added. Singh said the 348 polling booths have been divided into four zones and are being supervised by three Additional SPs assisted by four Deputy SPs.
Votes polled on Thursday in all the four constituencies will be counted on October 3.
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