Mamata Banerjee VS Suvendu Adhikari: All eyes on high-stakes battle in Bhowanipore

New Delhi: All eyes on high-stakes battle between two sides chief minister of west bengal Mamata Banerjee Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Suvendu Adhikari will also be present when votes are counted on Monday.All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Banerjee is re-contesting from the Bhabanipur seat, which has gone to the second phase of polls on April 29. Meanwhile, Adhikari is contesting from Nandigram and Bhabanipur as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate.In 2021, Banerjee played against Adhikari in his hometown Nandigram. She lost to the BJP leader by 1,956 votes. Adhikari now faces Banerjee in the CM’s home constituency of Babanipur. Babanipur has long been a Banerjee stronghold. She has represented the seat as a councilor since 2011 and has never lost an election. After becoming the chief minister in 2011, she won a decisive victory in the Babanipur by-election with a margin of 54,213 votes.In 2016, she defeated Left-backed Congress candidate Deepa Dasmunshi by 25,301 votes, narrowing her lead to 26,299 votes for the BJP.In 2021, the TMC retained Babanipur, where Sovandeb Chattopadhyay defeated the BJP’s Rudranil Ghosh by 28,719 votes. The BJP’s vote share rose to 35.2%, indicating its growing influence.Banerjee later returned to contest the Babanipur by-election and won by 58,835 votes to serve as CM for a third term.The electorate in Babanipur also changed, with 41,068 voters removed from the rolls, reducing the voter base by about 20% to about 160,000. An analysis conducted by Souptik Halder with Ashin Chakraborty and Sabir Ahamed found that 56.7% of voters marked in the “Deciding” category are Muslims, compared with 20% of the constituency population according to the 2011 Census.Earlier findings showed that Muslims accounted for 22.7% of voters marked as “Absent, Transferred or Dead/Duplicate” (ASDD) and about 26% of “Unmarked”, roughly in line with their proportion of the population. However, this number rises sharply to 52% in the “Logical Differences” list.Chakraborty said that although Babanipur is a mixed-community constituency, Muslims are over-represented among the voters under scrutiny. Halder added that a split analysis of 2021 and 2024 data showed that the TMC’s winning margin could drop significantly or even disappear in some booths if voters under the ruling are unable to cast their votes.