KOLKATA: Receiving a massive jolt in its north Bengal stronghold, the BJP failed to retain Dhupguri Assembly constituency in the by-election, losing to the ruling TMC. The saffron camp's debacle is significant ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as the BJP had made deep inroads in Bengal's northern region in the 2019 general elections, bagging seven out of eight seats.
The TMC won the Dhupguri seat with a margin of 4,309 votes by securing support of 46.28 per cent of the electorate who exercised their franchise in the bypoll. In the high-octane 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP had snatched away Dhupguri from the TMC with a margin of 4,355 votes.
The CPM and Congress alliance bagged only 6.5 per cent vote-share in the bypoll revealing no progress in its performance.
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West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee congratulated the electorate of the Assembly segment. “North Bengal is totally with us. In Dhupguri, it was a seat of BJP and we won the election. I congratulate all the people of Dhupguri,” she said.
BJP’s national general secretary is likely to visit Kolkata on Saturday and the unscheduled visit is said to be a fall out of the saffron camp’s defeat in Dhupguri. He is scheduled to hold a series of meetings with the state’s BJP functionaries to find the reason behind the debacle, said a BJP source.
“North Bengal proved to be our citadel in both 2019 general elections and 202 Assembly polls. This by-election was a litmus test for our party but the defeat came as a major blow to us. The poor performance in the bypoll will definitely have an adverse impact in north Bengal in next year’s Lok Sabha elections where a considerable chunk of electorates are Rajbanshis, a tribal community, and Matuas, a Hindu religious sect comprising scheduled caste refugees from Bangladesh,” said a senior BJP leader in Kolkata.
TMC’s national general secretary and Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, during his election campaign, promised that Dhupguri would be given the status of a sub-division which apparently proved to be a trump card for the TMC resulting its victory in the by-election.
