Bhabanipur bypoll: Mamata Banerjee registers resounding victory to remain chief minister

Kolkata, Oct 03: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee stormed to victory on Sunday in the Bhabanipur by-poll with a record margin of 58,835 votes.

Her victory, which came after her surprise defeat in Nandigram in assembly elections held earlier this year, was expected by most analysts.

Political pundits and voters were watching out for her margin of victory. By notching up an all-time high margin in this urban constituency in the heart of Kolkata, Banerjee seems to have underlined her popularity in her home state.

Banerjee, the TMC candidate for the Bhabanipur seat in south Kolkata, secured 85,263 votes. Her nearest rival, BJP''s Priyanka Tibrewal, garnered 26,428 votes, while CPI(M)'s Srijib Biswas polled 4,226 votes, the Election Commission said.

"I want to thank the people of Bhabanipur, West Bengal, who were waiting for these results. The people of Bhabanipur have given a befitting reply to the conspiracy that was hatched to defeat me in Nandigram. I don''t want to say much on a sub-judice matter. The counting is over, and we have won the seat," she said.

The chief minister had earlier lost the Nandigram elections narrowly to her former aide Suvendu Adhikari, now leader of the opposition from BJP in the state assembly. She has since filed a legal challenge to the election result.

"This is for the first time that we have won in all (municipal) wards of this constituency. The margin this time is an all-time high," she said.

Banerjee thanked the ECI for conducting the polls within six months.

"Since the assembly polls started in Bengal, the centre hatched a conspiracy to remove us from power," Banerjee, who had won the seat thrice since 2011 by-poll, claimed.

After Banerjee''s defeat in Nandigram, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, a state minister, vacated the Bhabanipur seat to facilitate her return to the assembly from the seat.

The TMC had won the constituency in the April-May assembly polls by a margin of around 28,000 votes. The assembly segment has been a bastion of TMC since its inception in 2011.

Bhabanipur which reflects cosmopolitan Kolkata's linguistic and ethnic mix and has large Punjabi, Gujrati and Hindi speaking communities living cheek by jowl with Bengali speakers.

The chief minister's home is in the centre of this south Kolkata constituency in the Kalighat area, which also houses an ancient temple to goddess Kali, from whom, some claim the city derived its name.

Reacting to the final round of counting, Tibrewal said she has accepted the people''s verdict with all humility, though she also alleged that TMC had rigged the vote.

"I accept the people''s verdict, my congratulations to Didi. I gave a fight, and the TMC machinery worked full time to indulge in largescale vote-rigging even (though) they were sure about Didi's (Banerjee's) victory. I exposed that on the day of polling," she claimed.

with PTI inputs