Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s hard work in West Bengal seems to have paid off as it crossed the double digit mark, prising away several seats from the strong grip of Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee.
The BJP wins 18 seats in the 42-seat Lok Sabha quota. It had got 2 in 2014. The BJP vote share has risen to nearly 40 per cent. Mamata is down to 22 from 33 last term. Congress has won two and the Left none.
It was evident from the very beginning that the BJP had set its heart on Bengal when the Election Commission announced a seven-phase polls in the state.
The party threw in the ring top campaigners including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, who also held an unprecedented road show in the heart of capital Kolkata.
The Bengal elections were by far the most violent in the country, with clashes marring each phase.
Virulent rhetoric flew from everybody. Modi called Mamata ‘speed-breaker didi’, while she retaliated by calling him ‘expiry babu’, hoping that he would lose.
But that was not to be because Modi has become the first non-Congress Prime Minister to have stomped back to power for the second term.
It was also a big victory for BJP's Kailash Vijayabvargiya, who led the party’s Bengal campaign.
Mamata Banerjee jas faced flak for what many termed her over zealousness to appease minority comminuties, thereby neglecting the interests of Hindus.
It is going to be a tough fight for her in the 2021 Assembly elections now that BJP has wrested so many Parliamentary seats. The other two parties, the once-mighty Left and the Congress have negligible presence in the state.
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