KOLKATA/FALTA: CPM came in a distant second – but a second, nevertheless – in the first election to an assembly seat after BJP’s victory in the recent state poll. Debangshu Panda of BJP – for the record – won Falta by a record 1,09,021 votes, a shade higher than the 1-lakh margin that CM Suvendu Adhikari had asked for from the electorate.This was BJP’s highest winning margin in the 2026 assembly elections, surpassing its 1,04,265 margin in Matigara-Naxalbari. In Falta, the party garnered 71.2% votes, up from 36.7% in 2021. But the far more important takeaway from the repoll result seemed to be the wholesale transfer of minority votes from Trinamool to CPM’s Sambhu Nath Kurmi – who got 40,645 votes (19.3% vote share) – and, to a lesser extent, Congress (10,084 votes). Trinamool’s Jahangir Khan came 4th with only 7,783 votes (3.7% vote share).
CM: Diamond Harbour TMC’s model of defeat TMC’s Jahangir Khan had announced 48 hours before the repoll that he was quitting the fray. The party lost its deposit in a seat that it won in four of the previous five assembly polls since 2001, and where it got a lead of 1.6 lakh votes (89% vote share) in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Trinamool national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee had retained the Diamond Harbour LS seat, of which Falta is one of the seven assembly segments, by a margin of more than 7 lakh votes in 2024. The party bagged 99% of the votes polled in 19 booths in Falta in the LS polls.In the 2021 assembly elections, TMC’s Sankar Kumar Naskar had won Falta defeating Bidhan Parui of BJP by 40,774 votes.CM Suvendu Adhikari wrote on Facebook, “TMC took a lead of one-and-a-half lakh votes in this constituency and made the past election a joke. Fifteen years later, when people regained their freedom to vote… the reality has come out. This is just the beginning. There is a long journey of rejection. The skeleton of the party is now exposed.”Claiming that TMC’s “infamous Diamond Harbour model” has become a model of defeat for the party, Adhikari said, “I had requested the people of Falta to give us a margin of 1 lakh votes. The winning margin crossed one lakh eight thousand. I will repay your debt through development,” he wrote in the post.CPM state secretary Md Salim said, “We could campaign only for a week – that, too, in a handful of booths – in Falta before the April 29 election. But before the repoll, we could increase our visibility and launch an intense campaign. That resulted in nearly 20% vote share for the Left.” The party had not fielded any candidate in the seat in 2021.Congress, which got 10,084 votes, said the “secular” votes went in its favour. Pradesh Congress president Subhankar Sarkar said BJP benefited from its winning streak in the recent state polls and the consolidation of Hindu votes.Minorities account for over 30% of Falta’s electorate.TMC’s Abhishek Banerjee said, “The counting of votes for the Falta repoll exposed glaring inconsistencies. By 3.30pm, all 21 rounds of counting were over. On May 4, only 2-4 rounds were completed by that time. The country deserves an explanation from EC,” he said and alleged that a large number of TMC workers were attacked before the repoll.
