Trinamul sweeps Kanthi Dakshin bypoll

Kolkata: The Trinamul Congress swept the Kanthi Dakshin bypolls in East Midnapore with 95,369 votes on Thursday. Its candidate Chandrima Bhattacharyya won by a margin of 42,526 votes. The BJP was in the second place 52843 votes, leaving the CPI in the third place with 17423 votes, and the Congress in the fourth and last place with only 2270 votes.

TMC’s results were better than that of the 2016 assembly election results, where the winning margin was 34000 votes. The BJP has bettered its stand in the state, considering it had managed only 15323 votes in the 2016 assembly votes. The party had fielded the Trinamul Mahila Congress president Chandrima Bhattacharyya from this seat who got as many as 95369 votes that amounted to 55.85 percent of the vote share. “The victory was expected. Kanthi Daskshin is with Ms Banerjee, her development work. And also her voice of protest against anti-people decisions. People here have bestowed their faith on our chairperson a number of times before,” Ms Bhattacharyya said after her victory. Talking about the rise of BJP’s popularity in the state, she said that the Congress and the Left had formed allies with the BJP. “It was the BJP’s hidden agenda and ‘under arrangement’ among the three opposition parties that resulted in this,” she said.

BUJ’s Orinda Mohan Jana, who won 52843 votes (a vote share of 30 percent), said that people had voted for the BJP unperturbed by the ruling party’s attempts to create an atmosphere of violence. “The increase of 37,620 votes for us within a year establishes the fact that the people of the state are with Narendra Mode’s economic enlistment policy,” Mr Jana said. BJP state president Dilip Gosh said that the election results were a clear pointer to the fact that the BJP had emerged in the second position after the Trinamul Congress. “TMC be careful, BJP is coming,” Mr Gosh said.