Sites of poll battles in West Bengal

The largest chunk of seats in the West Bengal Assembly, 61, will go to the polls on Thursday. Among the constituencies where polling will take place are Farakka and Murshidabad, constituencies in Kolkata such as Chowringhee, Beleghata and Belgachhia, and President Pranab Mukherjee's erstwhile Lok Sabha constituency, Jangipur.

Farakka is on the banks of the Ganga, and across the river is Bangladesh. It is at Farakka that the Ganga splits into two rivers. The broader channel goes east to Bangladesh and gets a new name, Padma. The smaller turns south and flows under the name of Bhagirathi, which becomes Hooghly as soon as it approaches Kolkata. Farakka has a famous barrage - the construction began in 1961 and ended in 1975 - and the idea was to divert some of the water from the Bangladesh-bound river to the Kolkata-bound one, to increase the latter's flow and therefore reduce sediment deposition at the Kolkata harbour. Murshidabad is currently represented in the Assembly by Congress strongman Adhir Choudhury.

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Jangipur used to be a Congress stronghold. But in the Lok Sabha elections, the party's margin shrank by 120,000 votes, whereas identity and caste-driven parties like the Welfare Party of India, set up in 2011, and the Socialist Democratic Party of India, formed in 2009, together got 66,311 (around eight per cent) of the votes. Both parties refer to the concerns of marginalised groups like Dalits, tribals, and Other Backward Classes, women and other minorities but their core mobilisation is among Muslims, who account for around 65 per cent of the electorate. The BJP got 85,887 votes (10.6 per cent of vote share), the highest for the party since it witnessed a spike in 1991 in the heyday of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

Among the other constituencies going to polls here are Samserganj, Suti, Raghunathganj, Sagardighi, Lalgola, Bhagawangola, Raninagar, Nabagram, Khargram, etc.