Kolkata: The gruelling one-and-a-half-month-long Lok Sabha elections may be over, but Bengal will soon witness bypolls for ten assembly seats. It was after five newly elected Trinamool MPs needed to resign from their MLA post, and three TMC candidates, previously BJP MLAs, had tendered their resignations from their MLA posts before fighting the elections.Also, BJP’s Manoj Tigga won the LS elections from Alipurduar, so a bypoll will now be held in Madarihat, which he represented as an MLA.
Moreover, the Maniktala assembly seat, which has remained unrepresented for over two years after the death of former consumer affairs minister Sadhan Pande in February 2022 due to a pending petition in SC, will also see a bypoll soon. An EC official said the commission had submitted a tentative schedule to the SC for holding the bypoll.
Trinamool MLAs who got elected as MPs in this election were June Malia (Midnapore), Partha Bhowmick (Naihati), Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia (Sitai), Arup Chakraborty (Taldangra) and Sk Nurul Islam (Haroa). The three BJP MLAs who contested as Trinamool candidates were Biswajit Das (Bagda), who contested from Bongaon, Krishna Kalyani (Raiganj), who contested from Raiganj, and Mukut Mani Adhikari (Ranaghat South), who contested from Ranaghat. All of them lost.
Two bypolls were held in the state along with the LS polls. The first one was in Baranagar, as TMC MLA Tapas Roy resigned to contest as a BJP candidate from the North Kolkata LS seat, and the second was in Bhagwangola where the sitting MLA Idrish Ali passed away. TMC has won both the bypolls.