West Bengal: Mamata Banerjee wins Bhabanipur, to continue as Chief Minister

Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee won the high-voltage Bhabanipur assembly seat with a record margin of 58, 835 votes, surpassing all her past records. In 2011, Banerjee got a margin of 54,213 votes over CPM's Nandini Mukherjee, which she broke this time.

Trinamool Congress' vote share in the Bhabanipur bypoll was 71.9% with 85,263 votes, followed by that of the BJP candidate Priyanka Tibrewal who received 22.29%. She got 26,428 votes. CPM candidate Shrijeeb Biswas received 4,201 votes with a 3.56% vote share.

For Banerjee, Bhabanipur is as important as Nandigram, which brought her to power in 2011. But she lost the election from Nandigram this year.


"I will work with more vigour as I am inspired by the people of Bhabanipur. I am thankful to the people of my constituency. People of Bengal were hurt when we won with a majority but we did not win one election," Mamata Banerjee said, hinting at her defeat in Nandigram. She also mentioned that "the matter is subjudice" and "a conspiracy was hatched against her".

"In 2011, I won with 54,000 plus margin and then also the polling rate was 44%. In 2021, 57% polling took place and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay won with 28,000 votes. The rate of polling is always less in Bhabanipur and this time the total polling was something more than 57%," Banerjee said, elaborating on how the rate of polling is always low in Bhabanipur.

In the assembly election held earlier this year, Trinamool's Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay defeated actor Rudranil Ghosh of the BJP in Bhabanipur by a margin of 28,719 votes. He vacated the seat for Banerjee.

In 2016, Banerjee defeated Congress veteran Priyanranjan Dasmunshi's wife, Deepa Dasmunshi, by 25,301 votes. Priyaranjan Dasmunshi was once a mentor of Banerjee. Netaji's kin Chandra Kumar Bose had fought on a BJP ticket at that time.

Speaking about her constituency which has a cosmopolitan population, Mamata Banerjee said 46% of Bhabanipur has a non-Bengali population with Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis and Marwaris.

Meanwhile, Trinamool won in two other assembly seats - Samserganj and Jangipur. The Trinamool candidate from Jangipur, Jakir Hossain, won with a huge margin of 92,480 votes. From Samserganj, Trinamool candidate Amirul Islam won with a margin of 26,379 votes. In Samserganj, the Congress candidate was in the second position with 70,038 votes.