These leaders do not hesitate to admit that the TMC could have won the four seats of Dinhata, Santipur, Khardah and Gosaba because ruling parties are always in an advantageous position in by-elections.

The break-up of votes, they claim, appears absurd if one takes records into account and, dangerous if one treats it as inevitable on the eve of the coming elections to the 100-odd civic bodies, including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

There is a sudden uneasiness in the opposition camp because the bypoll results show that the BJP lost the two seats it won six months ago and lost a big slice of its vote share since March-April. The same trend was noticed in the Bhawanipore bypoll held on September 30, in which Banerjee defeated the BJP after losing to Suvendu Adhikari at Nandigram in April.

On the other hand, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), which could not win a single assembly seat in March-April for the first time since Independence, has seen its vote share going up, albeit in just one constituency in October. The Congress is finding its base eroding without a stop.

The scale of TMC win

Though the BJP captured 77 Bengal seats in the March-April polls against a target of 200, its tally in the assembly has now effectively come down to 70. Five BJP legislators have joined the TMC since June, although none have resigned from the party. After wresting Santipur and Dinhata from the BJP last month and retaining Samserganj and Jangipur in September, the ruling party now officially controls 217 Bengal’s 294 constituencies. Polls in the previous two seats were not held six months ago as two candidates died.

“Many BJP leaders are in touch with us. The decision to induct or reject them will be taken by our highest leadership. [The] TMC is in no hurry to increase its numbers here. We are looking forward to winning in Tripura, Goa and other states. The recent bypolls have proved that nobody comes close to Mamata Banerjee in the popularity chart. Voters hailed the success of her social welfare schemes,” said TMC state general-secretary Kunal Ghosh.

The saffron camp has questioned this popularity theory. Its leaders claim that the TMC is trying to establish the same political hegemony that Bengal witnessed during 34 years of Left rule that Banerjee ended in 2011.

The BJP, which won the Dinhata seat by 57 votes and Santipur, by 15,878 votes in the March-April election, lost the seats by 164089 and 64,675 votes, respectively. Polls in these constituencies were held because the winners, Nisith Pramanik and Jagannath Sarkar, decided to retain their Lok Sabha seats instead after the BJP lost the state elections comprehensively.

At Khardah and Gosaba, where polls had to be held last month as the TMC’s winning candidates died, the BJP lost by 93,832 and 143051 votes, respectively. As a result, the BJP candidates in Gosaba, Dinhata and Khardah forfeited their deposits.

The BJP leadership questions the credibility of these results.

“At Dinhata, the TMC secured 84.15 % votes. Can anybody explain what wonders Mamata Banerjee did for people of this constituency in six months that radically altered the public psyche? We admit that voters turned out in large numbers but did they get to vote for candidates of their choice? I doubt,” said Bengal BJP’s chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya.

Dinhata is located at Cooch Behar district in the north Bengal region, where the BJP has grown fast in recent years. It bagged seven of the region’s eight Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and 30 of the 54 assembly seats six months ago. Buoyed by this success, some BJP lawmakers recently demanded a separate state or union territory carved out of North Bengal, a proposition the state leadership promptly treated as a hot potato.

Significantly, Udayan Guha, who won the Dinhata seat by 21,793 votes in 2016 and by 30,026 votes in 2011, but lost to Nisith Pramanik by 57 votes six months ago, was fielded by the TMC again.

Guha, who was injured in an attack after the last polls and accused Pramanik of terrorising voters, brushed aside the allegations of hegemonic control.

“People voted for Mamata Banerjee. The verdict was a spontaneous expression of their faith in her governance. Losers will always come up with excuses,” said Guha.

Dinhata, for the record, is not the only seat where the opposition has questioned the stunning numbers.

At South 24 Parganas district’s Gosaba, where the TMC’s Subrata Mondal secured 87.19% votes, the highest recorded in Bengal so far, the BJP’s Palash Rana alleged that voters were not allowed to exercise their franchise freely. He cited records.

TMC veteran Jayanta Naskar, whose death led to the bypoll, had won the Gosaba seat by only 23,619 votes six months ago, by 19,671 votes in 2016 and 10,682 votes in 2011. In sharp contrast, Mondal won the seat located in the remote Sunderbans area by 143,051 votes. Of the 230,348 voters, 185,435 people had turned up, and 971 of them voted for NOTA.

A senior TMC leader, who did not want to be named, said the leadership wanted to secure as many votes as possible and set records so that examples could be made before Banerjee ventured to other BJP-ruled states for contesting polls.

“This, fortunately or unfortunately, led to a competition among local leaders and party workers engaged in campaigning in all seats. Banerjee, too, broke her past records in the September 30 Bhawanipore bypoll by defeating Priyanka Tibrewal by 58,835 votes. A month later, her margin was surpassed by all four TMC candidates. Bear in mind that number of voters in all assembly constituencies are roughly the same, around 200,000, but the rate of turnout varies from place to place,” said the TMC leader.

Things that worry Bengal BJP

The March-April polls showed that contrary to what BJP leaders believed, Hindu votes had not polarised across Bengal. The campaign was marked by a few hundred rallies and roadshows held by top leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah, central ministers and leaders, and ministers from BJP-ruled states. Yet, the saffron camp could not come close to its goal of winning 200 seats.

BJP leaders adopted a strategy before the October 30 bypolls. In all four seats - which are located in districts lying along the Bangladesh border – they made the communal attacks during Durga puja in the neighbouring country an issue. Hindus are in the majority in these districts (2011 census), and many of them entered India as refugees from Bangladesh.

The strategy failed even in the BJP-controlled Santipur seat where Suvendu Adhikari, while attending a campaign, said: “The attack on minority Hindus in Bangladesh will increase the BJP’s margin of victory in Santipur three times.”

While speaking to HT on the condition of anonymity, a top state BJP leader said strategies alone should not be blamed for electoral failures.

“Infighting in our local units had a major contribution in our failure in all four districts. Just study the figures. There are serious organisational weaknesses and it is high time the leadership addressed these issues. Diminishing vote share can pose serious challenge in the coming days,” he told HT.

The BJP ended the race in Bhawanipore - a cosmopolitan south Kolkata neighbourhood with around 46% non-Bengali residents - with only 26,428 votes against 85,263 that Banerjee secured, marking a 71.9 % share of the 118,580 votes cast on September 30. The 57 % turnout was the lowest in Bhawanipore in 10 years.

Tibrewal fell far behind actor Rudranil Ghosh, who contested from Bhawanipore for the BJP on April 26 and bagged 44,786 votes. TMC’s Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, who won the seat, stepped down so that Banerjee could contest again from her old constituency and continue as chief minister. When Chattopadhyay contested, 61.79 % votes were cast and he defeated Ghosh by 28,719 votes.

Similarly, between the March-April polls and the October 30 bypolls, the BJP’s votes came down from 109,722 to 47,412 at Nadia district’s Santipur which the party wrested in the first attempt.

The scenario was no different in the seats where the BJP lost six months ago. Its votes climbed down from 616,667 to 20,254 at Khardah and from 82,014 to 18,423 in Gosaba.

BJP leaders feel that the trend is dangerous for a party demanding for months that civic elections, which were indefinitely postponed last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, be held as soon as possible. The state election commission recently announced that Kolkata and Howrah city polls will be held on December 19, and the rest of the districts will follow suit.

Ray of light for CPI(M), bad news for Congress

The 2019 Lok Sabha election results made it apparent that the most significant contribution to the BJP’s astounding performance in Bengal came from the vote bank of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), and its partners. Out of 40 Left candidates, 39 forfeited their deposits. The direct beneficiary was the BJP, which secured 18 of the 42 seats. In seats that the BJP could not win, the rise in its vote share was almost directly proportional to the corrosion in the Left vote bank.

The October 30 bypoll brought some good news for the CPI(M) for the first time in two years.

Although the CPI(M)’s overall vote share at Khardah and Santipur, the two seats it contested, stood at 7.28 %, the party got 39958 votes in Santipur, which it contested against the Congress, which was its electoral ally six months ago. In the March-April polls, the Congress candidate, while contesting alone, lost his deposit after securing only 9848 votes. And, this happened despite the Congress having won the seat nine times since 1961.

In Khardah, however, the CPI(M) candidate’s votes came down from 26916 to 16110 in six months.

“It appears that Left supporters who voted for BJP in 2019, thinking it was a more formidable force against the TMC than the Left, have done some introspection. However, the bypoll results do not bring good news to democracy. Not even Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher entered the parliament winning more than 80% votes. TMC wants to establish absolute control not only on the electoral arena but on our society as well,” said former CPI(M) legislator Tanmoy Bhattacharya who lost his Dum Dum North assembly seat to the TMC six months ago.