In a blow for the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party in West Bengal, three pollsters have predicted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will halt the TMC’s juggernaut in the state.
Three key exit polls that The Quint tracked – Today's Chanakya, ABP CVoter and India Today-Axis My India – predicted over 20 seats for the BJP and between 11 and 14 seats for the TMC.
Rejecting the exit poll predictions, the TMC on Saturday, 1 June, said it believed in people's mandate.
"Most of the exit polls had predicted a victory for the BJP in the 2021 assembly elections. But we all know what the actual results were – TMC won a two-thirds majority. We believe in people's polls, not opinion polls or exit polls. The TMC will win more than 30 Lok Sabha seats in the state," party leader Santanu Sen told reporters.
Sandeshkhali, Corruption Charges: Why TMC May Lose Out This Time
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the saffron party won 18 seats in the state, while the TMC won 22 seats. The Congress got only two seats. The pollsters’ seat projections were not much different either. Most of the exit polls results had predicted a neck-to-neck fight between the TMC and the saffron party.
Aiming to emerge victorious in 370 seats overall, the saffron party this time ran an aggressive campaign in West Bengal, focusing on issues like corruption and the recent incident in Sandeshkhali, where women accused a former TMC leader (Sheikh Shahjahan) of sexual harassment.
The saffron party in order to counter the TMC is banking on some surprising faces such as former Calcutta High Court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay and Sandeshkhali incident survivor Rekha Patra to gain support.
In their defence, the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC has made the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as one of its key election issues.
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