Actor Shatrughan Sinha, who played a memorable cameo in the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer ‘Kala Patthar’ that portrayed life in the coal mines, won the coal-belt Asansol seat by a margin of more than 3 lakh votes; this is the first time that the Trinamool has won this seat. A bypoll was necessitated here after BJP MP Babul Supriyo joined Trinamool a few months ago after quitting his party and resigning from the LS.
The BJP’s victory margin here in the 2019 LS polls was more than 1.9 lakh. This time, however, Trinamool polled more than 56% votes and led in six of the seven assembly segments. The party actually bettered even its 2021 assembly poll performance, when it had won five of the seven segments. BJP candidate Agnimitra Paul lost from even her “home” assembly segment of Asansol (South), from where she was elected an MLA less than a year ago.
Babul, now in Trinamool, won the Ballygunge seat, albeit with a much-reduced margin. Trinamool veteran Subrata Mukherjee, whose death made this bypoll necessary, had won the seat by more than 75,000 votes in May 2021; Babul’s margin came down to a little more than 20,000. The bypoll saw a much lower voter turnout as well, down to 41.2% from last year’s 60.9%.
What would be significant for both BJP and Trinamool was CPM candidate Saira Shah Halim coming second and pushing BJP to a distant third; this continued the trend — seen in the urban local body polls earlier this year — of anti-Trinamool voters pitching for Left Front instead of BJP that, even a year ago, was Bengal’s main opposition party. The CPM candidate even took leads in two KMC wards (64 and 65).
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/trinamool-wrests-asansol-from-bjp-holds-on-to-ballygunge/articleshow/90886571.cms
