The campaigning ended today for the crucial September 13 by-elections to two Assembly seats in West Bengal which is being held in the shadow of Saradha scam being investigated by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate.
The fate of a total 14 candidates in the fray will be decided in the by-elections - nine in the city's prestigious Chowringhee seat and five in the Basirhat Dakshin constituency in North 24-Parganas district bordering Bangladesh.
The BJP basking in the afterglow of its relative success in the recent Lok Sabha election was aiming big, hoping to wrest the Bashirhat Dakshin seat from the TMC and thus open its account in the Bengal Assembly.
The party's Lok Sabha candidate Samik Bhattacharjee had led from the Assembly segment in the Basirhat Lok Sabha constituency in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls by 30,000 votes.
In the Chowringhee Assembly seat, which is part of South Kolkata Lok Sabha constituency, TMC had trailed by 1,500 votes to Congress candidate Somen Mitra in this year's Lok Sabha election.
While the by-election to the Bashirhat Dakshin seat is necessitated by the death of the CPI-M's sitting legislator Narayan Mukhopadhyay, the one in Chowringhee became necessary after resignation of TMC MLA Sikha Mitra.
BJP state president Rahul Sinha said, "We are confident of winning the two seats if the polls are held in a free and fair manner."
The Left Front on the other hand had been relegated to the third position in the Bashirhat Dakshin segment and suffered its worst defeat in the Chowringhee segment pulling only nine per cent votes in the Lok Sabha polls.
It, however, expressed confidence that this time it would win the two seats.
"By-polls will be fought on different issues. Lok Sabha and Assembly elections are not the same. They are two different ball games altogether," CPI-M leader Rabin Deb said.
Congress leader Pradip Bhattacharjee also sounded optimistic of winning the seats. The party has put up Santosh Pathak, a councillor in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in Chowringhee and a local party stalwart Asit Majumdar in Dakshin Basirhat.
