West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress on Thursday retained the Maheshtala Assembly seat with an impressive margin, while the BJP took the second spot by displacing the CPI-M.
Trinamool candidate Dulal Das trounced his nearest rival Bharatiya Janata Party's Sujit Kumar Ghosh by 62,896 votes.
While Das bagged 1,04,818 votes, Ghosh received the support of 41,992 voters.
Left Front-spearhead Communist Party of India-Marxist aspirant Pravat Chowdhury, backed by the Congress, managed to obtain 30,316 votes in the triangular contest.
In the 2016 Assembly polls, CPI-M's heavyweight candidate Shamik Lahiri had gone down by 12,452 votes to Trinamool's Kasturi Das in the constituency.
The CPI-M-led Left Front had entered into an alliance with the Congress then, and the BJP received only seven percent of the valid votes.
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Kasturi Das's demise caused the by-election.
Dulal, Kasturi's husband and chairman of the Maheshtala municipality, led from the outset, and went on consolidating his position after every round.
Hailing Trinamool for coming out victorious in Maheshtala with a margin five times of its previous victory, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said her party alone is enough to fight opponents like the BJP or the Left in the state at present.
She said BJP's winning formula in a small state like Tripura would not work in Bengal that has a huge population.
"There is a lot of difference between an electorate of 23 lakhs and 10 crore," she added.
--IANS
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