While the Trinamool Congress registered an emphatic victory with a margin of over 64,000 votes in the Sabang Assembly byelection in West Bengal, the BJP came a distant third but with a considerable improvement in its vote share.
From a mere 2.6% of the votes in the 2016 Assembly elections, the BJP polled 18%, only 2.8 percentage points less than that of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which came second.
The byelection was considered “a prestige fight” between Manas Bhunia of the Trinamool and Mukul Roy of the BJP. Mr. Roy left the Trinamool and joined the BJP recently, while Mr. Bhunia did the reverse in 2016. Mr. Bhunia won the seat in 2016, but he was later elected to the Rajya Sabha and hence resigned as MLA. His wife, Gita Bhunia, contested now as the Trinamool candidate.
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In 2016, the Left and the Congress were in an alliance and thus the former did not put up a candidate.
However, in the byelection, they fought separately and the Congress got nearly 9% of the votes, a drop from nearly 60%.
A CPI(M) State Committee member told
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CPI(M) State secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra said the results established that the Left Front was the main Opposition against the Trinamool in the State. “Only the Left can provide a real alternative to the Trinamool and the BJP,” he said.
However, experts say the drop in the share of the Left and the Congress was helping the Trinamool and the BJP. While the final percentage is yet to be worked out, the two parties obtained about 15% more votes than what they got in 2016.
The TMC’s share went up from nearly 78,000 (36%) in 2016 to little over 1,06,000 (51%), a jump of nearly15 percentage points. The BJP’s share too has improved substantially — from 5,610 (2.6%) in 2016, it leaped to 37,000 (18%). State BJP president Dilip Ghose claimed that it is “an achievement to increase the vote share significantly… even after so much of rigging.”