Abhishek wins with highest-ever vote margin in LS polls’ history in Bengal
Kolkata: Trinamool Congress candidate from Diamond Harbour Parliamentary Constituency Abhishek Banerjee registered the highest ever victory margin in the history of Lok Sabha polls in Bengal.
Banerjee, who is the national general secretary of the party won by a margin of over 7.1 lakh votes breaking the previous record held by Anil Basu of CPI(M) who won the Arambagh seat by a margin of 592,502 votes during the 2004 Lok Sabha polls.
Banerjee has won for the third consecutive time, having won previously in 2014 and 2019. He bagged over 68.5 per cent of the votes. BJP’s Abhijit Das bagged the second place while Pratikur Rehman of CPI(M) bagged the third spot.
In 2014, Banerjee won the seat for the first time with a vote share of over 40 per cent and a margin of less than a lakh. Since then, he further strengthened his foothold in Diamond Harbour by defeating BJP by a staggering margin of 3.2 lakh votes in 2019, garnering 56.8 per cent vote share and leaving the saffron party a distant second with 33.5 per cent of votes. The 2021 assembly elections further solidified TMC’s dominance with all seven Assembly segments under the constituency going to Trinamool.
A strong bastion of the Left till 2004, Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha Constituency was wrested by the Trinamool Congress in 2009 when Somen Mitra defeated CP(M)’s Samik Lahiri. This is one of the constituencies established during the very first Lok Sabha elections in 1952. Consisting of seven assembly constituencies — Diamond Harbour, Falta, Satgachia, Bishnupur, Maheshtala, Budge Budge and Metiabruz — it covers the entirety of South 24-Parganas district and some parts of Kolkata district. Banerjee had coined the term “Diamond Harbour model” during the Covid pandemic when he took the initiative to conduct 50,000 Covid-19 tests in a day as his party workers raised funds to buy test kits over and above those provided by the government.
Post his 2019 victory, Banerjee launched a slew of initiatives exclusively for his constituency that other MPs could not. Besides conducting free Covid tests, his team ran community kitchens in every block and supplied free food packets every day during the pandemic. In June 2022, he launched ‘Ek Dakey Abhishek’, where one could dial a toll-free number to reach out to his office with their issues.
The masterstroke in the Diamond Harbour model was ‘Shrodhyargho’ (tribute) scheme where over 16,000 party workers voluntarily contributed funds towards giving a monthly pension of Rs 1,000 to 76,000 elderly persons in Diamond Harbour Constituency.
