The third leg of the six-phase Assembly elections in West Bengal went off largely peacefully on Wednesday as an estimated 77 per cent voters came out to get their index fingers marked in 75 seats of Kolkata and adjoining districts of North and South 24 Parganas.
“Around 77 per cent polling was reported till 5pm,” said Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Saibal Barman. For Kolkata, it was around 62 per cent while in North and South 24 Parganas 80 per cent and 82 per cent polling were recorded respectively, he added.
There were no reports of any major untoward incident in this phase of polling in 11 seats in Kolkata, 33 in North 24 Parganas and 31 in South 24 Parganas districts as over 6000 central para-military forces were deployed at 17,792 polling booths.
Meanwhile, there were reports that in North 24 Parganas 16 polling officials were replaced on the basis of complains from different political parties. Though, Barman said that these replacements were made because of “health reasons”.
However, Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee alleged that CPM tried to rig in some polling booths of Jadavpur costituency where Chief Minister Budhadeb Bhattacharjee is pitted against former state chief secretary and TMC candidate Manish Gupta.
“Chief Minister used to win by means of rigging only and today also CPM tried to rig in some polling booths of Jadavpur,” Mamta Banerjee said. Though Election commission (EC) said they have not received any such complain.
In some places, there were reports of malfunctioning of EVMs which, EC said, were promptly replaced.
Enthusiasm was high as people were seen lined up outside the polling booths since morning as voters exercised their voting rights to choose their representatives from among 479 candidates in 75 assembly seats.Besides Chief Minister Budhadeb Bhattacharjee, the fate of 11 other state ministers, including Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta, Housing Minister Gautam Deb, Transport Minister Ranjit Kundu, Leader of Opposition Partha Chatterjee and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) secretary general Amit Mitra, was decided in this leg of the poll.
Incidentally according to the political observers, these are the crucial seats which will be the deciding factors as Trinamool Congress (TMC) is expecting to put on a good show in its stronghold riding on the change wave. While in 2006 assembly poll Left Front won 54 seats here (23 were own by the opposition as there were 77 seats before delimitation), TMC-led opposition turned the table in 2009 Lok Sabha election as they were ahead of Left Front in 66 of these 75 seats.
The opposition alliance even grabbed all the Lok Sabha seats in these three districts of West Bengal.The six-phase polls to the 294-member assembly seats in West Bengal started on April 18 and will end on May 10. The first two phases saw around 85 percent turnout
