Kolkata: Riding the mood against the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in West Bengal, the Trinamul has washed away
the BJP’s saffron surge after the Lok Sabha polls in the state, bagging all three constituencies in the Assembly bypolls with new faces comfortably.
Of the three seats, it won two — Kharagpur Sadar in West Midnapore and Kaliaganj in North Dinajpur — for the first time, while retaining the Karimpur seat in Nadia.
While Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party reaped benefits out of the controversy over the NRC and the Citizenship Bill at Kaliaganj, earlier with Congress, and Karimpur seats due to its proximity to the India-Bangladesh border, it also successfully decimated the BJP at Kharagpur in a prestige fight as state BJP chief Dilip Ghosh, now Midnapore MP, was the MLA there in 2016. The winners are Tapandeb Singha at Kaliaganj, Bimalendu Singha Roy at Karimpur and Pradip Sarkar at Kharagpur.
Trinamul’s blow to the BJP, close on the heels of its failure in government formation in Maharashtra and also within six months of its winning 18 Lok Sabha seats out of the state’s 42, was such havoc that its state headquarters in heart of Kolkata wore a deserted look since Thursday morning, with the announcement of the results, similar to the scene at Ms Banerjee’s residence at Harish Chatterjee Street in Kalighat soon after the Lok Sabha results.
Attributing the BJP’s “arrogance” and “audacity” for its defeat, the Trinamul chief underlined the impact of the NRC and Citizenship Bill, that BJP’s Kaliaganj candidate, Kamal Chandra Sarkar, also acknowledged had “damaged” the party. Ms Banerjee said: “The people are seeing how the BJP is playing politics in the NRC’s name. If someone declares you are not a citizen of the country after 72 years of Independence, no one would accept it.”
