Udayan Guha of the Trinamool Congress says he stands vindicated. Before suffering the narrowest loss in these West Bengal elections by just 57 votes, he says he kept telling the voters of Dinhata in Cooch Behar that the BJP candidate Nisith Pramanik won’t remain their MLA for long if he wins.
Guha was proved right on Wednesday as Pramanik resigned as an MLA within ten days of winning the seat, choosing to remain the MP from Cooch Behar rather than an MLA from the Dinhata seat. Another Lok Sabha MP of the BJP, Jagannath Sarkar, chose the same route as he resigned from his MLA seat of Santipur. BJP’s number in the state assembly hence came down from 77 to 75 MLAs and by-polls will now need to be conducted on both the seats.
“BJP will remain at 75 seats and will lose both these by-polls. People have been defrauded by both these MPs. Why did they contest an MLA election if they never wanted to serve as MLAs? Everyone’s time has been wasted and people will teach the BJP a lesson. TMC will win the Dinhata seat by at least 50,000 votes now,” Guha told News18 on phone. Guha represented Dinhata for a decade as the MLA before losing by 57 votes to Pramanik this time.
In Santipur, TMCs six-time MLA Ajoy Dey lost to BJP MP Jagannath Sarkar by about 16,000 votes. Senior TMC leader and MLA from Bhowanipore, Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay told News18 that BJP never had enough candidates to contest the 292 seats and hence the party had to put in five of its MPs into the fight. “Nearly 140 of their candidates were also ex-TMC. Look at their three MP candidates – Union Minister Babul Supriyo, Locket Chatterjee and Swapan Dasgupta – all of whom lost,” Chattopadhyay said.
He said the two MPs of the BJP who won, Nisith Pramanik and Jagannath Sarkar, have also resigned as MLAs now. “This is wastage of public money as we will need by-polls now and we would have needed by-polls on MP seats if they had not resigned. All this will now happen in middle of a pandemic,” Chattopadhyay said. Incidentally, BJP had targeted Chattopadhyay after Mamata Banerjee shifted from Bhowanipore seat to fight from Nandigram and chose him to contest from here. Chattopadhyay won the seat easily.
“We have followed the party’s decision which was that we should resign from the assembly seats,” Pramanik said after submitting his resignation to the Assembly speaker along with Sarkar. TMC is confident of winning both these seats now after the big win in the state elections as well as three other seats which have to go to polls – Jangipur, Samsherganj and Khardah as candidates there have died. TMC hopes its seat tally will increase to 217.
BJP will continue to have 18 MPs from West Bengal.
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