KOLKATA: CPM’s vote share in Bhowanipore has plummeted from 20.4% in 2011 to 3.5% in the 2021 bypoll.
In 2011, Mamata Banerjee contested a bypoll from Bhowanipore to be elected to the state legislature after Subrata Bakshi vacated the seat. The byelection was held to elect a CM. CPM’s Nandini Mukherjee, a senior JU academic, who was Banerjee’s opponent from the constituency, had polled 19,422 votes. A decade later, chief minister Banerjee contested another bypoll from Bhowanipore.
This time, CPM candidate Srijib Biswas could garner a little more than 4,200 votes. “It was a bypoll to elect a chief minister for the second time (after Nandigram). The nature of the poll was different from others. This time, it turned out to be a binary battle, where the other opposing party (CPM) was projected by a section of the media as a decimated force. Religious polarisation has also gone up,” said Mukherjee. “In 2011, we noticed a sudden increase in polling after 1pm. Trinamool ministers started roaming around in the constituency. I will not be surprised if a similar trend was noticed this time.”
The election in multi-lingual and multi-cultural Bhowanipore was not a binary battle even in 2016 assembly elections, when BJP’s Chandra Kumar Bose had garnered 19% vote share. Congress’s Deepa Dasmunshi had bagged 29% vote that year. “Even in 2016, CPM had secured a substantial number of votes in Bhowanipore and had a strong worker base there. Had the Forward Bloc councillor at Ward 77 worked with us, the result might have been different,” said Dasmunshi.
According to CPM leader Rabin Deb, byelection was always tilted in favour of the elected party. “This is not an election to change the government. Also, it took some time for our workers to come to terms with the debacle in the assembly polls five months ago. At the same time, they were busy helping people out in the pandemic and natural disasters,” Deb said. “We were not even allowed to campaign on many occasions. We reported it to the EC but to no avail. Moreover, ministers like Subrata Mukherjee and Firhad Hakim were allowed to roam around on polling day.”
CPM candidate Biswas felt the poll was thrust upon people who were not ready for it. “The extra votes Trinamool won was an erosion from BJP. Our votes stayed nearly the same. At some booths, the opposition won single-digit votes,” he said. In April, when Congress and CPM were in alliance, Congress’s Shadab Khan had 4% vote share. “This was a by-election and the candidate was the chief minister herself. That had an impact,” he said.
