Kolkata, June 23: Trinamool Congress candidate Alifa Ahmed registered a massive win in the bypoll to the Kaliganj Assembly constituency in Nadia district of West Bengal. The Election Commission of India declared her the winner after 23 rounds of counting were completed. She won with a margin of 49,755 votes.
As per the ECI, Ahmed has secured 1,02,179 votes, BJP’s Ashish Ghosh came in the second position with 52,424 votes, followed by Left Front-supported Congress candidate Kabil Uddin Shaikh at 28,262 votes. The fourth position has been secured by NOTA at 2,500.
This means that the total votes going in favour of the Trinamool Congress candidate are more than the combined votes going in favour of the BJP and Congress candidates, as well as NOTA.
As expected, Alifa Ahmed surpassed the winning margin of her late father and then legislator from Kaliganj Nasiruddin Ahmed, who won from there in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections by a margin of 45,987 votes, defeating BJP’s Abhijit Ghosh.
Bypoll to the Kaliganj was necessitated by the demise of Nasiruddin Ahmed in February this year. Confirming her victory and the victory margin, Alifa Ahmed told media persons that the people of Kaliganj had voted in favour of development and also against attempts at communal divide.
“The people of Kaliganj have again proved that there is no space for communal politics in West Bengal. From my margin, it is evident that people from all religious communities have voted for me,” she said.
Kaligani is a minority-dominated constituency with Muslim voters constituting almost 60 per cent of the total voters there. According to political observers, from the results and the margin, it is evident that Trinamool Congress has successfully consolidated the Muslim votes in its favour, as it did both in the 2021 Assembly as well as in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. After this bypoll, Trinamool has 227 MLAs in the 294-member Assembly, the BJP has 66, and the AISF has one.
IANS