Enthused by the victory of the Trinamool Congress and other non-BJP parties in the by-polls, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said the beginning of the end for the BJP has started from Uttar Pradesh.
Ms. Banerjee said the general elections can be held anytime in the next few months. Trinamool won the Maheshtala Assembly seat, earlier held by the CPI(M), by a margin of over 62,000 votes on Thursday. After an extremely violent panchayat polls there were hardly any complaints from the Opposition in the Maheshtala bypoll.
Trinamool candidate Dulal Das secured 1,04,818 votes, while his nearest rival BJP’s Sujit Ghosh got 42,053 votes and the Left Front nominee Prabhat Chowdhury secured 30,384 votes.
The Congress did not put up a candidate and decided to back the Left Front nominee in the by-poll. The margin of the Trinamool victory, at 62,765 votes, is almost five times the 2016 Assembly poll win, when the Trinamool candidate Kasturi Das won by a margin of 12,452 votes.
While by-polls in West Bengal rarely spring a surprise and the ruling party has an edge over its rivals the rise in the vote of the BJP and slide of the Left-Congress vote is something that makes the polls crucial to political observers.
The Left Front nominee in the 2016 Assembly polls secured 42.2% of the votes while its vote share in the by-poll dropped to 17%. The BJP which had got 7.7 % of the votes in the 2016 Assembly polls emerged as the main Opposition, securing nearly 23% of the votes.
The decline in the vote of the Left parties and the Congress and the increase in the vote share of the Trinamool and the BJP has been a recurrent phenomenon in most of the by-elections in West Bengal since 2016.
Ms. Banerjee described the results as “a lesson for the regional parties to unite” and take on the BJP.
“The mandate is very clear: whichever party is strong in any particular region should take on the BJP in the general polls. This is requirement and also the formula,” she said.
Citing examples from different States, she said regional parties are very strong now and the situation should not be compared to earlier times when H.D. Deve Gowda, Chandrasekhar and I.K. Gujral led governments at the Centre supported by regional parties.
