As West Bengal’s Bhabanipur constituency faces bypolls, it is the second time in the last 10 years that Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee has turned to her home seat to save her chief minister’s chair.
The Bhabanipur constituency, which was formed in 2011 after delimitation, has been a stronghold of TMC since its inception. The chief minister’s Kalighat residence falls under this constituency.
According to Election Commission’s statistics, the TMC won the 2011 West Bengal assembly elections on 184 seats and ended the 34-year-old Left Front rule.
At that time, Banerjee had not contested the polls. Party MLA and then minister Subrata Bakshi had quit the seat to make way for Banerjee, who had taken oath as the chief minister. Then, Banerjee was seeking her maiden entry to the state assembly. She managed to save her CM chair as she won the bypolls.
In the 2016 assembly polls, she retained the seat. In 2021, Didi decided to move to Nandigram – where she faced defeat even though TMC won 213 seats in the state. Banerjee lost to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari – a former TMC leader — by a margin of 1,956 votes. Adhikari, a former close aide of the TMC chief, is now the Leader of Opposition in the West Bengal assembly.
Despite losing her seat, Banerjee took oath as the chief minister of the state on May 5. As necessitated by the rules, she has again turned to her home seat to save her post. She has to be elected to the state assembly before November 5 to retain the chair.
The seat was bagged by party’s Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, who vacated the seat in May to make way for Banerjee to contest from the seat.
Drop in party’s vote share, winning margin in Bhabanipur Constituency
While the TMC has won all the assembly elections held in Bhabanipur, the party’s vote share and winning margin has dropped. The party’s Subrata Bakshi won the 2011 polls with 87,903 votes, accounting for 65 per cent of the total votes. The winning margin was nearly 50,000 votes, the data from the Election Commission shows.
In the 2021 assembly polls, Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay won the seat with 73,505 votes, accounting for 57.71 per cent of the total votes. The winning margin was just 28,719 votes.
Mamata Banerjee had bagged the seat with the highest margin of more than 54,000 in the bypolls held in 2011. She bagged 73,635 votes, securing 78 per cent of the votes pooled. However, in the 2016 assembly polls, she secured 65,520 votes — only 48 per cent of the total votes. The winning margin in 2016 dropped to 25,301 votes, the Election Commission data shows.
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