People's Democracy

WEST BENGAL

Left Front Wins Bypolls By Big Margins

B Prasant

THE Left Front candidates have swept the Nabadwip (SC) Lok Sabha seat and the Vidyasagar assembly constituency by big margins. In the Nabadwip seat, which the Trinamul Congress had wrested from the Left Front back in 1999, Alakesh Das of the CPI(M), representing the Left Front, won by a margin of 98,800 votes, leaving the Trinamul candidate Abirranjan Biswas and the Congress hopeful Rajani Dolui wobbling in the wake of his sweeping win.

Through a statement, state CPI(M) secretary Anil Biswas has congratulated the electorate of Bengal for once more demonstrating their high level of political consciousness by ensuring a win for the Left Front in both the byelections and giving in the process a fitting reply to the anti-people policies of the BJP-run union government.

In 1999, when Trinamul Congress’s Ananda Mohan Biswas had defeated CPI(M)’s Asim Bala, the voting pattern was like this.

In 2003, the picture that emerged is like this.

In the Vidyasagar Vidhan Sabha seat, the Left Front’s CPI(M) candidate Anadi Sahoo won by a margin of 22,829 votes, securing 62.74 per cent of the valid votes polled. Sahoo’s nearest Congress rival Mahua Mondol could secure only 19,492 votes or 29.81 per cent of the valid votes cast.  The CPI(M) had won the Vidyasagar seat by a margin of just over 3,800 votes during the last assembly polls.  

In 2001, the Vidyasagar constituency saw a more or less straight fight between the CPI(M)’s Laxmi Kanta De and the Trinamul Congress’s Mahua Mondol. The results were as below:

The picture in the 2003 byelection in Vidyasagar was as below.

The Trinamul Congress, whose organisational base is eroding fast almost everywhere in the state, chose to describe the results as some kind of “invisible rigging.” Not to be outclassed when it comes to sprouting outlandish untruths, the Congress mulled over what appeared to them as “suppressed and miraculous rigging.” The BJP, which has lost its security deposit in the Vidyasagar seat, chose to abide by the old adage that silence is golden.