Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress or TMC is set to win all three Assembly seats. Bypolls for the seats were held on Monday. Kaliaganj and Kharagpur Sadar are already in the party’s kitty, while it is on the way to win Karimpur.
Dedicating the party’s victory to the people of West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the “BJP’s arrogance has cost them”. “We dedicate this victory to the people of Bengal. The BJP is getting paid back for its arrogance of power and for insulting the people of Bengal,” she told a TV news channel.
“So much arrogance and pride is not good. The BJP is too arrogant and proud. Sometimes they are saying NRC, sometimes they are saying they will evict people and then give citizenship rights,” Mamata Banerjee said.
“This result’s message is clear, people are saying goodbye to BJP. BJP should go back,” she said.
Tapan Deb Sinha won the Kaliaganj seat in a close contest, defeating his nearest BJP rival Kamal Chandra Sarkar by 2,418 votes, Election Commission officials said.
Congress’s Paramathanath Roy had won the seat in the last assembly election. The party had fielded his daughter Dhritashree, who finished third.
Kaliaganj is an assembly segment under Raiganj Lok Sabha constituency, which went to the BJP barely a few months ago.
In Kharagpur Sadar, Pradip Sarkar snatched the seat from the BJP’s Premchandra Jha by a comfortable margin of 20,788 votes. It’s a huge loss for the BJP considering the party’s state president Dilip Ghosh was the MLA from there before he got elected to the Lok Sabha from Kharagpur.
TMC’s Bimalendu Sinha Roy has established a lead of more than 23,000 votes over his BJP rival Jaiprakash Majumdar Karimpur, and looks all set to retain the seat. Popular TMC leader Mohua Mitra had won Karimpur in the last polls before she was elected to the Lok Sabha from Krishnanagar.
This is for the first time that the TMC has bagged the Kaliaganj and Karimpur seats.
The CPI(M) and the Congress, instead of trying to strenghten themselves, are “helping” the BJP in West Bengal, Banerjee said.
With about a year-and-a-half to go for the assembly polls in West Bengal, the TMC hopes to continue a winning trend.
The BJP had stunned the TMC in the national election a few months ago by upping its score in West Bengal from two to 16 after an aggressive campaign by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. The Trinamool Congress had to stay content with 22.