On Friday, a team of Trinamool Congress officials will meet with West Bengal’s chief electoral officer to urge that by-elections be held for seven assembly seats in the state.
The Bhabanipur constituency, from which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will run for re-election, is one of the seats up for by-election. She had lost the tightly fought Nandigram seat to her aide-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikary.
Senior party leader and education minister Partha Chatterjee said on Thursday the team will meet the CEO “tomorrow and urge him to expedite the process of holding by-polls to five assembly seats and fresh elections to two others”.
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The Bhabanipur seat has been a traditional Trinamool stronghold since Banerjee surged to office in 2011, deposing the 34-year-old Left Front government, and was won by the chief minister’s assistant Sovandeb Chattpadhyay in the most recent election in May. He will vacate the seat for the by-election to make way for Banerjee as the latter has to get elected within six months (November) of taking over as the chief minister.
The Trinamool leadership had already met with the Election Commission in Delhi to discuss the topic, but the poll panel has yet to commit to the election, citing the pandemic situation as the key reason.
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The ruling camp has maintained that if an eight-phase election could be held during the second wave of the coronavirus outbreak, there was no reason to postpone the bypolls now that the number of new cases in the state had dropped significantly. According to Adhikari, if trains are unable to run owing of the epidemic, elections should be postponed as well.
According to reports, the poll board is preparing to hold byelections in the state, but no date has been set. Banerjee and her party have accused the commission of favouring the saffron movement on several occasions.
