This seat, which was once the stronghold of the Forward Bloc is now in the name of the BJP, and five out of seven assembly seats are taken by the saffron party.
Cooch Behar is one of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies of West Bengal that often catch the headlines for heavy violence every time during the election. To combat this situation, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has decided to conduct voting in seven phases in the state this time. However, the election in Cooch Behar will be held in the first phase–April 19.
After the release of the election date by ECI, all parties have announced their candidates. The BJP has trusted the Union Minister, and the incumbent MP from Cooch Behar, Nisith Pramanik, is to contest against Trinamool Congress candidate Jagadish C. Basunia, while the grand old party (Congress) has fielded Piya Ray Chowdhury.
In the 2019 election, BJP’s Nisith Parmanik won this seat by a margin of 54,231 votes. Nisith got 7.3 lakh votes, while around 6.8 lakh votes were polled in favour of Adhikary Paresh Chandra of the TMC. Adhikary Paresh Chandra lost by 54,231 votes. Gobinda Chandra Roy of All India Forward Block (AIFB) got 46,810, and Congress Piya Ray Chowdhury secured the fourth position by getting 28,215 votes.
The Cooch Behar constituency consists of 62% of the Rajbanshi population, and in 2019, a major chunk of their votes went to Nisith Parmanik, and the BJP hopes to get the same response this time around. Since the BJP announced the name of its candidate earlier than other parties, it intensified the campaign to woo the voters of the constituency for the second time in a row.
The parliamentary seat of Cooch Behar was long held by the Left’s Forward Bloc, and they created history by winning elections from this seat 10 times. However, the picture changed in the 2014 Lok Sabha election as Renuka Sinha of the Trinamool Congress won the seat.
After the death of Renuka Sinha, Trinamool Congress Pratima Ray was successful in winning the by-election held in 2016. In the 2019 polls, BJP’s Nisith Pramanik wrote a new chapter in Cooch Behar politics by defeating the Trinamool candidate, and this lotus bloomed for the first time in Cooch Behar.
This seat, which was once the stronghold of the Forward Bloc, is now in the name of the BJP, and five out of seven assembly seats are taken by the BJP, and they looked confident enough to win this seat with a higher margin than they did in 2019. In 2019, it secured 47.98 percent of votes. There was an increase of 31.64 percent in the BJP’s vote percentage. Trinamool had 44.43 percent of the votes.
The constituency has around 18.1 lakh voters, including 9.4 lakh male voters and 8.7 lakh female. Total SC voters at the Cooch Behar (SC) parliament seat are nearly 8. 8 lakh that accounts of 48.6% of total voters. ST voters are just 9,053, which is 0.5%. Muslim voters are approximately 4.8 lakh, which is around 26% as per voter list analysis.