West Bengal: Sweet 16 for TMC in Kolkata clean sweep – Times of India

KOLKATA: Kolkata’s faith in Trinamool Congress remained unshaken in a make-or-break assembly election for Mamata Banerjee, with the party making a clean sweep of all 16 assembly seats up for grabs. Wresting the Jadavpur seat from the Left Front — the only one it hadn’t won in 2016 — made the victory sweeter.
The only scare came in central Kolkata’s Jorasanko, where BJP candidate Meena Devi Purohit led Vivek Gupta of TMC for several rounds before the latter surged ahead. TMC had trailed BJP there in the Lok Sabha polls two years ago.
Rashbehari, another TMC bastion that was jolted in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, kept the party on tenterhooks for most part of the morning before TMC candidate and former mayor-in-council Debasish Kumar opened up a lead against BJP’s Subrata Saha.
Two-time MLA Arup Biswas, who defeated Union minister Babul Supriyo in Tollygunge by his biggest-ever margin of 50,000-odd votes, dared his rival to try his luck again in the municipal polls. In Jadavpur, where CPM veteran Sujan Chakraborty had lost to TMC’s Debabrata Majumdar, the contest was onesided. Rinku Naskar, the CPM-turned BJP candidate, unwittingly helped TMC’s cause by grabbing a 26 per cent vote share to push Chakraborty to the third spot.
TMC continued its dominance in Behala with bold bets, including fielding Ratna Chatterjee, the estranged wife of former mayor Sovan Chatterjee, in Behala East. TMC’s performance in North Kolkata would have given it the most satisfaction. The party had trailed in Shyampukur in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and led by only 861 votes at Maniktala.
“The onus is on the new government to restore normalcy, and the path will not be easy. We have to begin fighting Covid from the beginning,” said minister Firhad Hakim, who won the Kolkata Port seat.