Kolkata: As many as 12 Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidates won from their respective Lok Sabha (LS) constituencies, they had contested from, by securing all the Assembly segments under the LS seats.
At the top of the list, there is Abhishek Banerjee who had contested from Diamond Harbour LS seat. Out of 42 LS constituencies, around 13 Trinamool Congress candidates won by a huge margin while one BJP candidate won with a respectable margin. BJP’s Tamluk candidate Abhijit Ganguly won from all the seven Assembly segments under the Tamluk LS seat. He has defeated his nearest rival TMC Debangshu Bhattacharya by around 77,000 votes. Abhishek Banerjee on the other hand won from all the Assembly segments under his LS seat.
Banerjee won by a margin of over 7 lakh votes. He has won with the highest margin of votes in the state.
The other Trinamool Congress candidates who have won from their respective LS seats by securing all the Assembly segments are Sougata Roy (Dum Dum), Pratima Mondal (Joynagar), Bapi Halder (Mathurapur), Saayoni Ghosh (Jadavpur), Mala Roy (Kolkata South), Prasun Banerjee (Howrah), Sajda Ahmed (Uluberia), Kalyan Banerjee (Srerampore), Kalipada Soren (Jhargram), Sharmila Sarkar (Burdwan East), Shatabdi Roy (Birbhum), Asit Kumar Mal (Bolepur). All the TMC candidates have got a lead from all the Assembly segments under their LS constituencies.
It may be mentioned here that the people belonging to the minority community helped TMC sweep Muslim-majority pockets in the southern region of Bengal while the division of their votes facilitated BJP’s victories in the northern part of the state.
In a state where minority voters constitute around 30 per cent of the electorate, their influence extends to 16-18 Lok Sabha seats, making them a coveted voting bloc for all parties.
Several Parliamentary seats in both north and south Bengal, such as Raiganj, Cooch Behar, Balurghat, Malda North, Malda South, Murshidabad, Diamond Harbour, Uluberia, Howrah, Birbhum, Kanthi, Tamluk, Mathurapur and Joynagar, have significant Muslim populations.
In the 2023 Panchayat election, the cumulative votes of the Left and the Congress stood above the BJP’s.
In 2024, while the BJP managed to recover Hindu votes that went back to the Left in the rural polls, Muslim votes split in a 2019-like pattern – the BJP got 37.18 per cent, the TMC polled 31.7 per cent and the Left-Congress alliance 27.14 per cent.