Veteran journalist and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Swapan Dasgupta lost against Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate Ramendu Sinharay in the Tarakeshwar assembly constituency.
Dasgupta had resigned as the Rajya Sabha to contest in the Bengal assembly polls. Apart from the drubbing in Tarakeswar, the BJP faced an overall setback as party fell way short of the 200-seat target it had adopted ahead of the polls.
As per official data from the Election Commission released as of 9 pm, the TMC was ahead in 215 out of the 292 seats contested, and the BJP was a distant second with leads in 75 constituencies.
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The Tarakeshwar assembly constituency was last won by the TMC’s Rachhpal Singh. The seat was also bagged by the party in the 2011 polls.
This year, polling was held in eight phases in West Bengal between March 27 and April 29, in Assam in three stages on March 27, April 1 and 6. The state has the maximum number of 1,113 counting halls at 1,113, the Election Commission said.
Further, a three-tier security arrangement is in place in West Bengal's counting centres and 256 companies of central forces deployed across 23 districts of the state that voted in a gruelling election marred by violence and vicious personal attacks.
The result will decide whether Mamata Banerjee, who has been in power for 10 years and is arguably fighting the toughest poll of her political career, has been able to thwart the challenge by the battle-hardened election army of the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
The BJP, which had just three seats in the 294-member Assembly after the polls and went to win 18 out of 42 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, had pulled out all the stops in the state in a determined bid to oust Banerjee, a vocal critic of Prime Minister Modi, and add another state to its tally of 17.
The Left-Congress alliance is the third main contestant in the state.
Counting of votes for the assembly polls is also underway in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry (UT).
Follow Moneycontrol’s full coverage of the 2021 assembly election here
(With PTI inputs)
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