Kolkata: Counting was underway for the bypolls to the Asansol Lok Sabha and Ballygunge Assembly seats in West Bengal with the Trinamool Congress candidates leading in both constituencies.
After the completion of the third round of counting, Trinamool Congress candidate from Ballygunge and the singer-turned-politician, Babul Supriyo was leading by 4,676 votes.
In the case of Asansol, counting for just one round has been completed at the time the report was filed. Trinamool Congress candidate and actor-turned politician, Shatrughan Sinha was leading by little over 6,500 votes than the BJP candidate, Agnimitra Paul
However, the surprise in Ballygunge was the remarkable progress of the CPI-M and Congress candidates and the unprecedented disaster faced by the BJP candidate after the completion of the first three rounds of counting.
In Ballygunge, after the third round of counting, the total votes that went in favour of Supriyo was 9,751 votes. The CPI-M candidate, Saira Shah Halim was in the second position getting 5,075 votes followed by the Congress candidate, Kamruzzaman Chowdhury in the third position getting 2,186 votes. The BJP candidate Keya Ghosh after the third round of counting was in the fourth position getting just 621 votes.
The progress of both CPI-M and Congress this time seems better when compared to the results in the 2021 Assembly elections, when the Congress and Left Front had a seat sharing agreement. Even after that seat sharing, where the Congress did not contest, the then CPI-M candidate Dr Fuad Halim got his deposit forfeited by getting a total of just 8,474 votes, which was just 5.61 per cent of the total votes polled.
In 2021, BJP’s Loknath Chatterjee was in the second position with 31,226 votes, which was 20.68 per cent of the total votes polled. The winner then was Trinamool Congress candidate and former state panchayat minister, Subrata Mukherjee who got 1,06,585 votes, which was 70.60 per cent of the total votes polled. Mukherjee died in November last year which necessitated the bypolls in Ballygunge.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Supriyo, as a BJP candidate, defeated Trinamool candidate actress-turned-politician Moon Moon Sen by a massive margin 1,97,637 votes and also secured a whooping 51.56 per cent of the total votes polled. After the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls, Supriyo joined Trinamool Congress and also resigned as the Asansol Lok Sabha member that necessitated the bypolls in Asansol
