Campaigning ends for Oct 30 by-elections

Kolkata: The campaign for the by-elections, on October 30, in four Assembly seats came to an end at 6pm on Wednesday.

The Assembly seats where the bypolls will be held on October 30 are Khardah, Gosaba, Dinhata and Shantipur.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidates Kajal Sinha and Jayanta Naskar died making by-election in Khardah and Gosaba necessary. Sinha had died of Covid before the result of the Assembly polls was announced on May 2.

In Dinhata and Shantipur, by-election became necessary after the BJP candidates Nisith Pramanik and Jagannath Sarkar did not take oath of office. Pramanik who defeated Udayan Guha by 57 votes has become the Union minister of state for Home Affairs.

About 9.67 lakh people will exercise their franchise in the by-elections in the four Assembly constituencies.

Trinamool candidates in the four seats are Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay in Khardah, Brajokishore Goswami in Shantipur, Subrata Mondol in Gosaba and Udayan Guha in Dinhata.

The BJP candidates for the four Assembly seats are Joy Saha in Khardah, Palash Raha in Gosaba, Niranjan Biswas in Shantipur and Ashok Mondol in Dinhata.

Trinamool Congress left no stone unturned to ensure victory of its candidates.

Abhishek Banerjee, national general secretary of the party had campaigned in all the four constituencies.

Party veterans Saugata Roy, Partha Chatterjee, Firhad Hakim, Mohua Moitra took part in the campaign.

Sayani Ghosh, Trinamool Youth Congress president took part in the campaign along with actor-turned politicians Dev, June Malliah, Soham Chakraborty and Sayantika Banerjee.

The fight is between Trinamool Congress and BJP in all the four Assembly seats.

Except Shantipur, Trinamool is well ahead of its rival BJP candidates in the three other seats.

Political analysts said it seemed that BJP had given up in three seats and their main target is Shantipur where party candidate Jagannath Sarkar had won by over 15,000 votes in the Assembly election. Here BJP may put up fight against TMC, they said.

However, in Shantipur, the political meeting of Suvendu Adhikari was a flop as the local party leaders toiled hard to fill up the first few rows. Taking a cue from the poll debacle in the Assembly election, BJP did not deploy leaders from Delhi and banked on the state leaders.

The counting of votes of the by-elections is slated to be held on November 2.