New Delhi: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has won the Bhabanipur assembly constituency by a margin of 58,389 votes, after 21 rounds of counting of votes. She has exceeded her own record of the 2011 Bhabanipur by-election where she won by 54,213 votes, News18 reported. BJP’s Priyanka Tibrewal is trailing at the second spot with 26,320 votes.
According to India Today, Tibrewal has conceded defeat to Banerjee and said, “I accept my defeat gracefully and I will not go to the court. But they said that Mamata Banerjee will win by 1 lakh vote margin, but she has got around 50,000 votes. I will congratulate Mamata Banerjee, but the way she has won the elections, everyone has seen that.”
The TMC is also ahead in Murshidabad’s Samserganj and Jangipur constituencies, where votes are being counted for the assembly elections.
Banerjee, the TMC candidate in the Bhabanipur assembly seat in south Kolkata, secured 67,620 votes after the 17th round of counting, as per the official data.
Her nearest rival, BJP’s Priyanka Tibrewal, got 21,882 votes, while Srijib Biswas of the CPI(M) secured 2,896.
The Bhabanipur bypoll on September 30 saw a voter turnout of 57%.
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A total of 26 rounds of counting of votes are being held for Samserganj and 24 rounds for the Jangipur constituency at the Sakhawat Memorial School of Kolkata.
In Samserganj, TMC candidate Amirul Islam was leading by 3,768 votes after the fifth round of counting. He secured 19,751 votes, while his nearest rival, Zaidur Rahaman of the Congress, received 15,983 votes.
Jangipur’s TMC candidate Jakir Hossain was leading by 15,643 votes after the second round of counting. Hossain secured 25,572 votes, and his nearest rival, BJP’s Sujit Das, got 9,929 votes.
As the reports of Banerjee’s massive lead came in, TMC supporters hit streets across the state to celebrate with green “abir“.
West Bengal: TMC supporters celebrate outside CM Mamata Banerjee’s residence in Kolkata as she leads in the Bhabanipur Assembly by-election pic.twitter.com/roWsaX9moK
— ANI (@ANI) October 3, 2021
On the other side, the BJP and the CPI(M)’s state offices wore a deserted look.
Meanwhile, the Election Commission wrote to the chief secretary directing him to prohibit victory celebrations and processions to prevent any incident of post-poll violence.
Tibrewal, on Saturday night, wrote to the Acting Chief Justice of Calcutta high court Rajesh Bindal, urging him to give orders to the police to take preventive steps to avoid incidents of violence after the declaration of the results.
After Banerjee’s defeat in Nandigram, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, a state minister, vacated the Bhabanipur seat to facilitate her return to the assembly from there.
The TMC had won the seat in the April-May assembly polls by a margin of around 28,000 votes.
(With inputs from PTI)
Note: The story has been updated with the final counting results of the Bhabanipur by-election. More information will be added as soon as it is made available.