BJP sweeps Falta repoll, wins by one lakh votes

BJP on Sunday swept the repoll to Bengal’s Falta Assembly seat with a victory margin of more than one lakh votes in the constituency long seen as a citadel of the TMC, whose nominee slipped to fourth place and forfeited his deposit.

Polling 1,49,666 votes, the BJP’s Debangshu Panda defeated his nearest rival, the CPI(M) Sambhu Nath Kurmi, by a margin of 1,09,021 votes. Kurmi secured 40,645 votes while the Congress Abdur Razzak Molla finished third with 10,084 votes.

TMC’s Jahangir Khan, once among the most talked-about faces of the Falta campaign, slipped to fourth place with just 7,783 votes and forfeited his deposit. Two days before polling, Khan had announced that he was stepping aside “for Falta’s interest”, a move the BJP mocked as an attempt to “run away” from the battle.

However, since withdrawal of nomination was not possible at that time, his name remained on the EVMs. The Falta Assembly seat had been held by the TMC since 2011. The party retained the constituency in 2021 with around 57 per cent of the votes polled. Sunday’s verdict, however, marked a dramatic collapse in the party’s support base.

BJP secured 71.2 per cent vote share in the repoll, a sharp jump from 36.75 per cent in 2021, while the TMC’s vote share crashed to just 3.7%.

The result came days after the BJP ended the TMC’s 15-year rule and scripted a regime change in West Bengal earlier this month, lending the Falta contest significance far beyond the boundaries of South 24 Parganas and turning it into an early test of the State’s altered political landscape.

With the Falta victory, the BJP’s tally in Election Commission records for the 2026 Assembly polls rose to 208 from 207, though its effective Assembly strength remained 207 after Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari vacated Nandigram upon retaining Bhabanipur. Adhikari described the verdict as proof that “reality had come to light” when people were allowed to vote freely.

Promising to repay the “debt through development” and build a “golden Falta”, he launched a sharp attack on the TMC, alleging that the party, while in power, had transformed itself into a “mafia company” that abused state machinery, looted public funds and fostered a culture of syndicates and intimidation.

The result also cast a shadow over what the TMC had long projected as the politically impregnable “Diamond Harbour model”, as the BJP sought to convert a local repoll into a larger political message.

The Assembly constituency had become the centre of controversy after the April 29 polling when complaints surfaced over alleged use of perfume-like substances, ink marks and adhesive tapes on EVMs at multiple booths. The Election Commission ordered a repoll in all 285 booths on May 21, held under an unprecedented security blanket.