With booth-level analysis of the recent Lok Sabha poll results showing that Trinamool Congress trailed the Bharatiya Janata Party at 47 of Kolkata’s 144 municipal corporation wards and lost at two assembly segments, ruling party chairperson and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has sought a report from her close aides on the matter.
Non-Bengalis, especially those who speak Hindi, comprise a sizeable section of voters in most of these 47 wards, which include four in the Bhawanipore assembly segment represented by Banerjee.
According to TMC and BJP leaders, more than 20 % residents of the Bhawanipore assembly constituency are Muslims while non-Bengali Hindus comprise around 34 % of the local population.
“Although this trend was noticed in almost every election held since 2011 when TMC ousted the Left Front government, Didi (Banerjee) has taken a serious note of the results in Kolkata in view of the 2026 state elections since there are 28 assembly seats (of Bengal’s 294) in the state capital and its adjoining areas,” a senior TMC leader said on condition of anonymity.
TMC has retained control over 26 assembly seats in and around Kolkata, winning both Lok Sabha seats, Kolkata South and Kolkata North, but in terms of assembly segments, it lost two.
TMC trailed BJP by around 1,600 votes at Shyampukur, represented by industry minister Shashi Panja, a close aide of Banerjee. TMC also fell behind by 7,400 votes at the Jorasanko assembly seat that Vivek Gupta won in 2021 by more than 12,000 votes defeating BJP’s Meena Devi Purohit, a veteran councilor at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC).
Shyampukur and Jorasanko are part of the Kolkata North Lok Sabha segment that witnessed a close contest because senior TMC leader and former minister Tapas Roy, who resigned from the Bengal legislative assembly in March and joined BJP, was fielded against incumbent Sudip Bandopadhyay, his archrival.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi held his first ever roadshow in Bengal on May 28. Modi’s convoy passed through the heart of the Kolkata North seat prompting Banerjee to hold a roadshow along the same route the next day.
“The results make it apparent that Kolkata residents exercised judgement while casting votes,” Sajal Ghosh, a BJP councillor from the Kolkata North Lok Sabha segment, said.
BJP set a record in Bengal in 2019 by winning 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats but its tally has now come down to 12.
In the 2022 civic body polls in the KMC area, BJP wrested 10 of the 144 wards. In the 2021 assembly polls, TMC was ahead of BJP at 132 wards.
At a closed-door meeting held on Saturday, Mamata Banerjee asked Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim to conduct a survey and find out within a month if Kolkata residents are unhappy with civic amenities in the KMC area, a TMC leader said on condition of anonymity.
“Our party has always been in close touch with the masses. The leadership will take appropriate steps to find out why a certain section of voters supported BJP,” KMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said.
The Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat was won by Mamata Banerjee six times between 1991 and 2011. Although considered a safe seat for the ruling party, BJP increased its vote share in the Bhawanipore assembly segment in some of the civic body and assembly polls over the years due to its popularity among Hindi and Gujarati speaking voters from this area.
TMC’s Mala Roy, who won the Kolkata South seat in 2019, defeated BJP’s Debashri Chaudhary who won north Bengal’s Raiganj Lok Sabha seat, her home ground, in 2019. Despite Kolkata South being an unfamiliar ground for Chaudhury, BJP managed to overtake TMC at several municipal wards.
