‘TMC will increase number of seats, vote share in state’

Kolkata: Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Kunal Ghosh, on Sunday, said that his party will get at least 30-35 Lok Sabha seats and the percentage of its vote share in Bengal will be anything between 58 and 62.

According to Ghosh, the Left and Congress will fail to secure even one seat in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. There are 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal. He said that BJP may get 5-11 seats and its vote share may remain around 30-32 per cent. Ghosh is optimistic that Trinamool may even bag more than 35 seats depending on the situation. He made the prediction in a post on X. He said that the prediction was made depending on the situation till March 24.

In 2019 Lok Sabha elections, TMC bagged 22 seats and its vote percentage in the state was around 43 per cent. BJP managed to get 18 seats in 2019 while Congress got only two.

Ghosh said that TMC has however set a target of winning all the 42 seats. He also pointed out that the objective would be restricting BJP to two to four seats. Incidentally, Trinamool’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, during a television interview, said that his party will perform better compared to 2019 in terms of vote share as well as number of seats.

Meanwhile, Ghosh claimed that his party did not know which organisations or persons donated money to it under the electoral bond scheme. Talking to reporters, he said: “Trinamool Congress did not know how much money was given to it… A drop box was kept in front of the party office building for donations…”

He further stated: “According to the law introduced by the BJP, the bond would have no name, only an alphanumeric code. The names of the company or the donor would not be mentioned. The BJP introduced this system in the country. They knew who gave them money. Because they have the CBI, ED and Income Tax, they used these agencies to accumulate that money but the TMC has no ED or CBI.”