West Bengal Bypolls: TMC Sweeps All 4 Assembly Seats, BJP Comes in Second

The by-elections were held on 30 October in West Bengal’s Dinhata, Santipur, Gosaba, and Khardaha constituencies.

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(Photo Courtesy altered by The Quint)

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) won all four assembly seats where by-polls were held on Saturday, 30 October.

Meanwhile, Banerjee congratulated the winning candidates and said in a tweet, “Bengal will always choose development and unity over propaganda and hate politics".

The by-elections were held on Saturday, in West Bengal’s Dinhata, Santipur, Gosaba, and Khardaha constituencies.

The Results of the Bypolls

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

The Trinamool Congress candidate from Gosaba, Subrata Mondal won the bypoll by a margin of 1,43,051 votes.

Bharatiya Janata Party’s Nisith Pramanik had resigned from the Dinhata seat after he took over as the junior home minister at the Centre. Udayan Guha who contested from the seat in Cooch Behar won with a margin of 1,64,089 votes against Ashoke Mondal of the BJP.

Meanwhile, the seat in Santipur was vacated after BJP MP Jagannath Sarkar resigned from the assembly. The TMC candidate in Shantipur, Braja Kishor Goswami, won the bypolls by 64,675 votes, according to the Election Commission of India.

Former Kolkata Mayor Sovandeb Chattopadhyay won the seat in Khardaha by a margin of 93832 votes, defeating BJP's Joy Saha.

He had earlier given up the Bhawanipore seat for Mamata Banerjee, who after losing from Nandigram and had to get elected within six months of the state elections to keep her post as the chief minister.

According to Election Commission data, the ruling Trinamool Congress got 76.5 percent of the total polled votes whereas the BJP, the second largest party in the state, managed to get only 14.5 percent of the votes.

The addition of the four seats adds to TMC’s total tally of 213 seats in the state elections.