Opposition questions huge victory margins of Trinamul candidates: Twenty-six TMC candidates secured over 80% of votes

Twenty-six TMC candidates secured over 80% of votes, while another 42 secured over 70%, contributing to the ruling party’s 72.12% vote share (provisional) in Calcutta

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee speaks to the media outside her Kalighat residence on Tuesday. : Pradip Sanyal

MEGHDEEP BHATTACHARYYA, ARKA DATTA MAJUMDAR | TT  |   22.12.21  :  Huge victory margins of several Trinamul candidates, in the backdrop of charges that the party’s ward-level workers and supporters had vitiated Sunday’s Calcutta Municipal Corporation election process, were branded “suspect” by the Opposition.

In Ward 66, Trinamul’s Faiz Ahmed Khan won by 62,045 votes against the CPM’s Shaquib Akhtar. In Ward 58, Trinamul’s Sandipan Saha won by 40,823 votes, defeating the BJP’s Chandan Das. In Ward 109, Ananya Banerjee won by 37,623 votes against the CPM’s Shikha Pujari.

Faiz Ahmed Khan.: The Telegraph

Another Trinamul candidate won by a margin of over 30,000. Nine others won by margins of more than 20,000 votes.

“These margins would put Assembly elections to shame. It is clear as day that loot of votes took place on Sunday,” said CPM state committee member Samik Lahiri.

To buttress this argument, Opposition leaders pointed out that seven Trinamul candidates secured over 90 per cent of valid votes polled, two among them, Ashutosh Das in ward 35 and Raghunath Patra in ward 142, over 93 per cent.

Twenty-six Trinamul candidates secured over 80 per cent of votes, while another 42 secured over 70 per cent, contributing to the ruling party’s 72.12 per cent vote share (provisional) in Calcutta.

“Compare Trinamul’s victory margins to that of the 10 seats not won by the ruling party. The highest margin was of (the BJP’s) Vijay Ojha, which was 3,213…. The election was not free, not fair, not peaceful,” said the BJP’s state chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya.

As many as 116 BJP candidates had to forfeit their deposits, 112 Congress candidates followed suit. Contesting in 128 seats, Left candidates forfeited deposits in 95 wards.

Sandipan Saha.: The Telegraph

In India, if a candidate fails to get a sixth of the valid votes polled in a constituency, the sum deposited by the candidate is seized by the election commission.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew and Trinamul’s national general-secretary Abhishek Banerjee had repeatedly warned the party against excesses in the CMC election it was virtually guaranteed to sweep, but many events of Sunday suggested this went unheeded. Opposition parties alleged mass rigging, with 453 complaints lodged with the poll panel till 5pm. At least 13 Opposition candidates and 146 polling agents of Opposition parties directly alleged coercion on Sunday.

Ananya Banerjee.: The Telegraph

Public responses from Mamata and Abhishek since Sunday suggest that those allegedly vitiating the poll process were unlikely to be taken to task.

Several Calcutta-based political scientists said the alleged vitiation ran counter to Trinamul’s poll strategist Prashant Kishor’s doctrine of a hands-off approach to elections like civic polls.

Some Trinamul insiders privately blamed ward-level leaders’s desire to ensure resounding victories at any cost.

“The top-most leadership warned against all this…. What happened was avoidable. It gives the Opposition the scope to question the credibility of the mandate. This wasn’t possible in the Assembly polls,” said a Trinamul leader.