West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had fancied her chances of becoming prime minister if the Lok Sabha elections threw up a fractured mandate. However, early trends in counting of the Lok Sabha votes on Thursday showed she faces a Herculean task in staving off the BJP in the next assembly election, scheduled to be held in 2021.
At 11am, the BJP was leading in 16 of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies in West Bengal with Banerjee's TMC ahead in just 25. In 2014, the BJP had won just Asansol and Darjeeling, while the TMC won 34 seats.
In addition to the BJP's meteoric rise in five years, the 2019 Lok Sabha polls seems to be another indication of the CPI(M)-led Left Front's fall into irrelevance. After dominating the state for over three decades, the Left is not leading in any of the 42 seats. The TMC had a vote share of nearly 45 per cent, while the BJP's vote share approached 39 per cent.
For BJP, Babul Supriyo, a Union minister in the first Narendra Modi government, is leading in Asansol by a margin of nearly 50,000 votes against Moon Moon Sen of the TMC. In Barackpore, former TMC MLA Arjun Singh, who switched over to the BJP this year, is leading against former railway minister Dinesh Trivedi. S.S. Ahluwalia of the BJP, who won from Darjeeling in 2014, is leading in Burdwan-Durgapur against Dr Mamata Sanghamita of TMC by a margin of over 16,000 votes. In Darjeeling, Raju Bista of the BJP was leading by over 46,000 votes against Amar Singh Rai of the TMC.
In some comfort for the TMC, actress Nusrat Jahan, who is making her poll debut, is leading in Basirhat by a margin of over 45,000 votes against Sayantan Basu of the BJP. In Jadavpur, another actress, Mimi Chakraborty of the TMC, was leading against Anupam Hazra, a former TMC leader who joined the BJP, by a margin of over 40,000 votes. In Kolkata North, Sudip Bandyopadhyay of the TMC was leading against Rahul Sinha of the BJP.
For the Congress, state party chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury was the sole source of relief, as he led in Behrampur against Apurba Sarkar of the TMC by a margin of over 26,000 votes.
