NEW DELHI: According to the Election Commission of India’s data, the strategy of fielding turncoats in the Lok Sabha elections by both West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed miserably, as nearly all of them performed poorly except for one.
Mamata Banerjee-led state ruling party TMC has fielded four turncoats in its list of 42 candidates who were either elected representatives from other parties or had joined the party in recent years. Similarly, the BJP had fielded five, including Arjun Singh and Tapas Roy, who joined the party from TMC. However, except one, none of the nine candidates tasted victory.
Four of the five turncoats of the BJP failed to secure victory in the Lok Sabha election. Of these five candidates who switched from the TMC to the BJP, only Soumendra Adhikari won the election. He defeated Uttam Barik of TMC with a margin of 47,764. He got 7,63,195 votes, while the runner-up, Uttam Barik, got 7,15,431 votes.
BJP has fielded Soumendu Adhikari from Kanthi, Arjun Singh from Barrackpore, Tapas Roy from Kolkata Uttar, Silbhadra Dutta from DumDum, and Rathin from Howrah. However, except for Soumendu Adhikari, all others have failed to leave their mark in the general election.
In Barrackpore, over the past five years, Arjun Singh has switched between the two rival parties multiple times. In 2019, he left the Trinamool Congress and won the Barrackpore seat for the BJP with a margin of about 13,000 votes. Three years later, he rejoined the Trinamool Congress amid a price-cap crisis in the jute industry in 2022. However, as the 2024 election approached, he switched back to the BJP after being denied a ticket by the TMC. Although the BJP had feilded him from Barrackpore, he was unable to leave a mark on the parliamentary constituency. He lost to TMC candidate Partha Bhouwmick with a margin of 64438. Singh got 455793 votes while his rival Partha Bhouwmick got 5,20,231 votes.
Similar situations were seen in the case of former TMC leader Tapas Roy, who also crossed over from TMC to BJP just before the Lok Sabha election. He was seeking a ticket from TMC for the Kolkata Uttar seat, but TMC had fielded Sudip Bandhopadhyay from the same seat, and as a result, he switched to the BJP. The saffron party had shown trust in Ray and fielded him against the Veteran TMC leader Sudip Bandhopadhyay. However, Roy lost the election to Sudip Bandhopadhyay with a margin of 92,560. Tapas Roy got 3,62,136 votes, while Bandhopadhyay secured 4,54,696 votes in the election.
On the other hand, TMC had fielded four turncoat candidates in the fray, and all of them lost in their respective constituencies. The state ruling party TMC fielded Biswajit Das from Bangaon, Mukut Mani Adhikari from Ranaghat, Krishna Kalyani from Raiganj, and Sujata Mondal in Bishnupur.
Bangaon candidate Biswajit Das, who joined the party from the BJP in 2021, lost the seat to its arch-rival Santanu Thakur with a margin of 73,693 votes. Thakur received 7,19,505 votes, while Biswajit Das only managed to get 6,45,812.