Three-fold rise in BJP's vote share challenge for TMC in phase 4 of Bengal polls

The fourth phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections in which 44 Assembly seats in five districts will go to polls, will be a high-stakes battle for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP. While the TMC will seek to retain 39 out of the 44 seats which it won in the 2016 Assembly election, the BJP will try to maintain the more than three-fold increase in its vote share from the 2016 Assembly elections to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The fate of 373 candidates will be decided by more than 1 crore voters.

While the BJP just won one seat out of the 44 in the last Assembly elections, it led in 19 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The TMC led in 25 seats in the 2016 Assembly elections. Moreover, the saffron party’s vote share shot up from 12.13 per cent in the last Assembly elections to 40.88 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

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The TMC’s vote share came down from 46.02 per cent in the poll-bound seats in the 2016 Assembly elections to 44.73 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The Left Front’s vote share also came down from 28.79 per cent in the last Assembly elections to 9.63 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. As for Congress, its vote share came down from 6.71 per cent in the 2016 Assembly elections to 1.88 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections.

If the last Lok Sabha elections' results are anything to go by, then the BJP has a clear advantage in the nine seats in Cooch Behar and five seats in Alipurduar district in North Bengal. BJP led in seven out of the nine seats in Cooch Behar and all the five seats in Alipurduar in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The TMC in the last Assembly elections won eight out of the nine seats in Cooch Behar and four out of the five seats in Alipurduar.

However, the situation is different in the 11 seats in the South 24 Paraganas district. Not only did the TMC win 10 out of the 11 seats in the last Lok Sabha elections, it led in all the seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

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As for the nine seats in Howrah district, the TMC won all of them in the last Assembly elections and led in eight of them in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. BJP led in one seat.

The saffron party led in six out of the 10 seats in Hooghly and the TMC led in four in the last Lok Sabha elections. The TMC won eight out of the 10 seats in the 2016 Assembly elections.

Constituencies such as Tollygunge, Singur, Domjur will be of key interest. The fates of several heavyweight politicians such as TMC Ministers Arup Biswas, Partha Chatterjee, CPI(M)’s Md. Salim, Sujan Chakraborty, Congress’ Abdul Mannan and BJP’s Babul Supriyo will be decided in the fourth phase. Several celebrity candidates such as TMC’s former cricketer Manoj Tiwary, actor Lovely Maitra and BJP’s Srabanti Chatterjee are also in the fray.