As the counting of the votes for by-elections on the Gosaba assembly seat in West Bengal began on Tuesday, the initial trends show Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate Subrata Mondal leading with 22,033 votes against Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Palash Rana who has secured 1,558 votes.
According to the Election Commission data at around 9 am today, the Revolutionary Socialist Party candidate Anil Chandra Mondal has secured 426 votes till now and is followed by independent candidate Tutun Mondal who has secured 182 votes.
Following the voting for four assembly seats in West Bengal that took place on October 30, the by-poll results for these constituencies-- Dinhata, Khardaha, Gosaba (SC), and Santipur will be announced today.
The counting of votes is underway at Dinhata College Counting Centre in West Bengal.
Santipur and Dinhata seats fell vacant after BJP MP Jagannath Sarkar and Nishith Pramanik resigned from the assembly, respectively. Whereas, elections on the other two seats are being held as All India Trinamool Congress' (TMC) MLAs Kajal Sinha (Khardaha) and Jayanta Naskar (Gosaba) died due to COVID-19.
There is a tough fight between the BJP and the TMC for retaining the seats they had and capturing the other two.
TMC leader Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, who had resigned from the Bhabanipur constituency to facilitate Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's election to the Assembly, is fighting from Khardaha.
The Mamata Banerjee-led TMC registered a landslide victory in polls held earlier this year, winning 213 seats in the 294-member West Bengal assembly. The BJP emerged as the second-largest party with 77 seats.
Banerjee, who had lost to BJP's Suvendu Adhikari in the Nandigram constituency in the assembly elections, marked a landslide victory in the Bhabanipur by-polls held in September, securing her post as chief minister.
( With inputs from ANI )
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor