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TC retains Kolkata South by record margin
History repeated itself in prestigious Kolkata South Lok Sabha constituency with the Trinamool Congress on Sunday winning the seat by a whopping margin of more than 2.30 lakh votes routing the CPI(M) for the seventh consecutive time in the past 20 years.
State PWD and Transport Minister and Trinamool candidate Subrato Bakshi humbled CPI(M)’s Ritabrata Banerjee a greenhorn by a margin of 230,099 votes. While Bakshi also the State Trinamool Congress president polled 516,761 votes Banerjee got 286,662 votes.
The parliamentary by-election was necessitated after sitting MP Mamata Banerjee vacated the seat to contest the Bhawanipore Assembly by-elections in order to enter the State Assembly.
The election was held on November 30 amid low voter turnout with only 52 per cent of voters exercising their franchise as against about 72 per cent in the 2009 general elections.
Terming the victory a “triumph for democracy,” Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took a dig at her allies (read Congress) for fielding dummy candidates in the 2009 elections “otherwise we could have got many more seats.” The BJP factor had also reduced the victory margins in 2009, she said.
The Trinamool currently has 19 seats in Lok Sabha and allies Congress and SUCI have 6 and one each. While the Left had won 15 seats in 2009, BJP got its sole victory from Darjeeling.
Kolkata South has a history of returning non-Left candidates. In 1999 Mamata Banerjee won the seat by a margin of 2.32 lakh votes while that margin was reduced to 99,000 in 2004 when she defeated CPI(M)’s Rabin Deb. However, in 2009 that margin again sky-rocketed to 2.19 lakh.
The victory one again underscored the fact that the State was still passing through the Mamata wave and the people continued to repose their faith in the Chief Minister despite her being in power for more than 6 months, experts said.
“Our Assembly seat wise votes have gone up but one has to understand that 6 months is not enough for that anti-incumbency factor to take root,” said Deb a CPI(M) State secretariat member.
