Around 85% polling was recorded in the sixth and last phase of West Bengal assembly polls in the 14 remaining constituencies on Tuesday.
Around 85% polling was recorded in the sixth and last phase of West Bengal assembly polls in the 14 remaining constituencies on Tuesday.
Voting started at 7 am and continued till 3 pm in the Maoist-hit districts of West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia. An electorate of over 26.57 lakh voters decided the fate of 97 candidates.
Prominent candidates whose fates were sealed in the ballot boxes included minister Sushanta Ghosh, Rabilal Moitra and leader of Maoist-backed Peoples Committee candidate Chatradhar Mahato who is contesting the election from jail as an independent.
A popular but local TV channel in a survey said immediately after the sixth phase was over that the TMC-Congress combine would get 221 seats. The Left coalition, according to the survey, would get 62 or little more with BJP two and others nine.
While carrying out such surveys remains the preoccupation of both local media and local media-savvy politicians, the more practical and shrewder ones are busy working out deals in Delhi.
For example, TMC sources said Mamata Banerjee would be leaving any time for Delhi to discuss the “future cabinet” she had in mind with Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee.
Sources said she would also discuss the fiscal measures she would have to take to arrest the fall of a debt-trapped and crumbling economy. She would make financial demands on the Centre like she the ones she had listed out to prime minister Manmohan Singh during a joint campaign in Dum Dum.
The Left on its part would discuss how to strategise, if they have to sit in the Opposition and win over dejected masses in the rural belt, to woo them back from Maoists’ sphere of influence, avoiding confrontation with them. “After all the Maoist threat would not vanish after the opposition comes to power as they made a sustained ideological investment in the affected areas,” a senior bureaucrat told this reporter.
—With agency inputs
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