With another three months left for Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee —a “non-Member” in House —to get herself elected to the State Assembly a delegation of Trinamool Congress leaders on Friday met Election Commission of India officials demanding early holding of by-elections to five Assemblyseats.
“We had come to meet the Chief Electoral Officer to remind him and the ECI that elections to two Assembly seats and by-elections to other five constituencies are pending and that the Commission should take measures to get elections done as early as possible so as to enable the electorate get themselves represented in the House,” TMC secretary general and senior Minister Partho Chatterjee said emerging from the meeting with the CEO.
The Minister said “initially we saw the ECI was taking initiative in holding the elections but suddenly we find that there is no activity on their part to hold elections … it is the same ECI which had held elections in eight phases despite our repeated objections because of the pandemic situation then … at that time the State was witnessing 17 to 18,000 cases daily with an infectibility rate of 33 percent … but now it has come down to a few hundred with infectibility rate dropping to about 1-and-a half percent … it is the best time to hold elections and allow the people of these constituencies to enjoy their democratic rights.”
Elections in two seats of Rejinagar and Raghunathganj in Murshidabad district were cancelled after Congress and RSP candidates died of corona. Subsequently two BJP MPs, Nesmith Pragmatic and Jagannath Sarkar, who won the assembly polls resigned the Ranaghat and Cooch Behar seats. Later two other TMC MLAs died of corona infection. A seventh TMC MLA from Bhawaniporre, Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, his seat to allow the Chief Minister to contest from that seat in the bypolls.
A TMC delegation comprising senior MPs had met the full bench of ECI on July 15, seeking early bypolls.
Even though the Trinamool Congress roared back to power for the third time in the recently concluded elections the Chief Minister was defeated in Nandigram by her protégé-turned-adversary Suvendu Adhikari who joined the BJP a few months before elections. She lost by 1,900 votes.