Trinamool Congress to Examine Urban Poll Performance in Bengal
Remedial Measures Planned Following BJP’s Leads in Municipalities and Corporations
Trinamool Congress to Examine Urban Poll Performance in Bengal
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) has announced plans to examine the reasons for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leads in many of the 125 municipalities and corporations in Bengal in the Lok Sabha polls. The party aims to take remedial measures to improve its performance in urban centres.
Despite winning 29 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats, a senior TMC leader in Calcutta acknowledged that the party’s performance in urban areas was not satisfactory. The BJP secured leads in around 60 per cent of the wards in 125 municipalities and corporations.
In Bolpur, where TMC candidate Asit Mal won by a margin of over 3.27 lakh votes against the BJP’s Piya Saha, the BJP got a lead of around 5,800 votes in the Bolpur town. The BJP was ahead of TMC in 16 out of 22 wards.
The trend of the BJP’s rise in vote share in urban pockets started in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when the party bagged 18 out of Bengal’s 42 constituencies. In the 2021 Assembly polls, when the TMC got a clean sweep by winning 215 seats in the state, the voting pattern in the urban pockets was not changed.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has asked Calcutta Mayor Firhad Hakim to examine the reason behind such results in the city. Political observers have suggested that the contrast between the TMC’s performance in rural and urban areas shows that people who are not dependent on different welfare schemes and benefits through direct account transfer did not vote for the ruling party in small and semi-urban pockets.
Multiple TMC functionaries have suggested that issues related to civic amenities and leaders’ roles in municipal and corporation elections last year were responsible for the party’s underperformance in the urban pockets.
BJP’s chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya claimed that the section that played a role in opinion-making had voted for the party in the Lok Sabha polls. He said, “The opinion makers voted for us and that is why we got a lead from five wards in Calcutta that are part of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Assembly segment. The rural people also voted for us and that is why we won 12 seats in remote areas like Purulia and Raiganj.”
