BJP's Hasi Rani Rath wins Nandigram by 1.22 lakh votes, and the party takes Rejinagar

Hasi Rani Rath of the Bharatiya Janata Party won the Nandigram assembly bypoll on Friday by 1,22,753 votes, the largest margin in the seat since 1967. She took 1,64,427 votes, 75.94 percent of the total. Congress candidate Milan Pradhan finished second with 41,674. CPI candidate Santi Gopal Giri took 5,779. All India Secular Front candidate Ali Md Sabe Miraj Khan took 1,607. The Democratic Trinamool Congress, led by Ritabrata Banerjee, finished fifth with 853 votes.

In Rejinagar, in Murshidabad, BJP candidate Shankharavh Sarkar won by more than 75,000 votes. Aam Janata Unnayan Party candidate Golam Nabi Azad was second. The Hindu put his tally at 54,098; an earlier wire figure of about 40,000 does not match that count, and the commission figure is the one that will stand. The Hindu reported both seats as BJP holds or gains from the 6 October poll. With the two results, the BJP has 209 seats in the 294-member West Bengal assembly.

The Nandigram margin breaks the seat record set by Suvendu Adhikari in 2016, when he won it for the Trinamool Congress by 81,230 votes. Earlier this year, as chief minister after the BJP's assembly victory, Adhikari held Nandigram by 9,665 votes, with 50.37 percent. Friday's bypoll more than doubles his 2016 margin and lifts the BJP share from just over half to just over three quarters. The vote was held on 6 October. Turnout in the earlier cycle was reported at 80.89 percent for Nandigram. The commission had not, in the reports used here, published a matching turnout for the count.

Adhikari thanked minority voters in both seats. He said the BJP received the support of 80 percent of Muslims in Nandigram and more than 60 percent in Rejinagar. About 27 percent of Nandigram's electorate is Muslim. About 70 percent of Rejinagar's electorate is. He said Muslims had been told they would be put in detention centres and barred from practising their religion, that those claims had proved false in five months of BJP government, and that this was why they voted for the party. He said that under Congress, Left and Trinamool governments, Bengali-speaking Muslims had backed the party in power, and he hoped the BJP, which took 46 percent in the last assembly election, could reach 60 percent.

Those percentages are the chief minister's reading, not a booth-level release. A party can win a seat that is 27 percent Muslim without winning 80 percent of Muslim votes, if the Hindu vote is sufficiently concentrated. Rejinagar is the harder case. A seat that is about 70 percent minority, won by more than 75,000 votes, requires a large share of minority votes or a collapse in opposition turnout. The fifth-place finish of the Democratic Trinamool Congress in Nandigram, on 853 votes, is the sharper number. The party that held the seat for years is not the runner-up. It is a remnant.

The bypoll does not change who governs. The BJP already has a majority. It changes the map inside that majority, and it changes the opposition's claim on two seats that were used, for a decade, as proof of a regional hold. Nandigram was the village movement that made Adhikari a state figure, then the seat he carried from Trinamool to the BJP. A 1.22 lakh margin, with the old party on 853 votes, is a different constituency from the one he won by 9,665 votes earlier this year.

Counting in other bypolls, including seats in Tamil Nadu and Assam, was still being reported on Friday afternoon. The West Bengal pair is the result with a full candidate table. The open item is the certified turnout and the booth-wise split Adhikari used for his 80 percent and 60 percent claims. Until the commission publishes that split, the margin is the fact and the community share is his account of it.