New Delhi: With the Lok Sabha election being in the last leg, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) of West Bengal has sensed that the BJP has gained ground in the state, possibly at the cost of the Left, due to polarisation efforts of the saffron party.
The state, which has witnessed the most bitter electioneering this time around between the TMC and the BJP, will have polling on the remaining nine of the 42 LS seats on Sunday, the seventh and last phase of the election. The TMC, which swept the 2014 general election in the state by bagging 34 LS seats, is unsure of repeating the same performance this time.
According to a senior TMC leader, the Left votes will be the key factor this time around to determine how many seats the Mamata Banerjee-led party would get in the ongoing election. In the 2014 election, the TMC had increased its tally by 15 seats over the 2009 election results by wresting seats from the Left Front.
The Left parties had won only two seats, which was a decrease of 13 seats it had bagged in the 2009 election. The BJP had won two LS seats in 2014, up from one which it got the previous time. In these poll, the TMC got a vote share of 39.05 per cent, up by 8.13 per cent from the previous election.
The BJP had got 17.02 per cent votes, an increase of 10.88 per cent from the 2009 election. The TMC hopes to win 30 seats in the state this time but feels if even 10 per cent of Left votes swing towards the BJP, then its tally could drop as low as to 25, meaning a loss of 19 seats from the last time.
There is an assessment in the party that the leaders of Left parties themselves might be asking their supporters to vote for the BJP, since they feel they cannot defeat the TMC and that the BJP was in a better position to do so, the TMC leader said. The TMC feels polarisation efforts of the BJP were helping the saffron party and it could gain in some 15 seats having Hindu majority.
So the tally of BJP could go up to even 10 seats, the TMC feels. The BJP has gone all out to make electoral gains in West Bengal, with PM Modi himself holding several rallies. Party chief Amit Shah has also addressed many public meetings besides holding road shows in the state.
The state has witnessed the most bitter election campaign this time, which was accompanied by violence during all the six phases. The latest episode of violence was witnessed during a roadshow of Amit Shah on Tuesday, with the statue of Ishwar Chandra Bandyopadhyay, an icon of West Bengal, being vandalised.
The EC invoked for the first time Article 324 of the Constitution which gives it special powers to control and give directions for holding election. The decisions have been “taken as an action on violence in West Bengal on Tuesday”, an EC official told the media about the action .
“This is probably the first time the EC has invoked Article 324 in this manner but it may not be the last in case of repetition of lawlessness and violence which vitiate the conduct of polls in a peaceful manner,” the official said. The constituencies going to polls on May 19 are Dum Dum, Barasat, Basirhat, Jaynagar, Mathurapur, Diamond Harbour, Jadavpur, Kolkata (South) and Kolkata (North).