In a close electoral battle Congress candidate and President Panab Mukherjee's son Abhijit Mukherjee today won the Jngipur Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal's Murshidabad district by a slender margin.
At the end of the counting of votes cast on electronic voting machines (EVM), Mukherjee was leading by a small but decisive margin of 2536 votes over his nearest CPI-M rival Muzaffar Hussain.
According to the Election Commission at the end of the final seventeenth round of counting, Mukherjee bagged 3,32,919 votes while the CPI-M got 3,30,383 .
However, 139 ballot papers were yet to be counted.
The Lok Sabha seat fell vacant after former Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who used represent the constituency, moved to Rashtrapati Bhavan in July. Pranab Mukherjee had won the seat in 2009 by a thumping margin of over 1,28,149 votes.
While Congress has lost over 15% in terms of vote share as against the 2009 Lok Sabha poll, CPI-M's vote share too has decreased by about 1.5%.
BJP, whose candidate Sudhangshu Biswas bagged 85,887 votes in the by-poll, emerged as the biggest gainer. The party has registered an increase of about 7.8% in vote share as compared to its performance in 2009.
Speaking about his electoral victory, Abhijit Mukherjee said, “We are sad about the margin. Still a victory is a victory.”
Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the face of the party in the district and who, according to Mukherjee, “made the victory possible” admitted the fact they had to fight in the backdrop of an extremely difficult scenario.
“This is a hard-fought victory. The fact that Abhijeet was an outsider and a Hindu candidate was a factor. Also, this is a difficult time for various reasons. Still, we should have won by at least a 50,000 margin,” he said.
According to Chowdhury, the fact that Trinamool Congress did not put up a candidate has gone in favour of CPI-M and BJP.
“TMC had asked Hindus to vote for BJP, while Muslim supporteres were asked to vote for CPI-M's Muslim candidate.”
TMC, however, rejected the explanation given by the Congress.
“We supported Abhijit only, as CPI-M is our main opponent. BJP is still not a factor in the state.”
This is the first election in Bengal after the Congress-TMC split.
As per 2011 assembly election, Congress had five of the seven Assembly constituencies under the Jangipur Lok Sabha seat, CPI-M and TMC bagged one each.
However, as per the by-election, CPI-M is leading in four assembly seats, while Congress is ahead in three assembly seats.
