Sagardighi by-poll: Cong' lead margin increases to 8k after 7th round

KOLKATA: After the seventh round of counting of votes for the by-elections to Sagardighi Assembly constituency, the Left Front-supported Congress candidate Bayron Biswas's lead margin has further increased to over to 8,000 votes pitting Trinamool Congress candidate Debasish Bandopadhyay in the second position.

BJP's Dilip Saha continues to be in the third position.

After the first three rounds of counting at Sagardighi, which were mainly concentrated in pockets with a mixed religious population of voters, from the fourth round, counting started in those pockets where the minority voters are predominantly the dominant factors.

However, quite contrary to expectation that the ruling Trinamool Congress will recover its trail in the first three rounds from these minority- dominated pockets, to the surprise of all the Congress candidate further consolidated its lead margin to over 8,000 votes.

Overwhelmed by the trend of results, the state Congress president in West Bengal and veteran party Lok Sabha member Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said that the trend proves that the minority voters of Sagardighi have totally rejected Trinamool Congress.

"The state's ruling party has played with the sentiments of the minority voters without going for any constructive development of the community. After we got reduced to zero in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls, some said that Congress is finished.

Now Sagardighi proves that Congress will never be finished. Who can say that Sagardighi is the beginning of Trinamool Congress's end in West Bengal," Chowdhury said.

The bypoll in Sagardighi was necessitated following the sudden demise of erstwhile Trinamool Congress MLA Subrata Saha on December 29 last year.

He was a three-time TMC legislator from the Sagardighi Assembly constituency in Murshidabad district, securing consecutive victories in 2011, 2016 and 2021.

In 2021, he got elected defeating BJP's Mafuja Khatun by a margin of 50,216 votes.