New Delhi: Two of India’s leading female chief ministers, Rajasthan’s Vasundhara Raje and West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, are set to face a test on their own home turf. Two Lok Sabha seats and one assembly seat in Rajasthan and a Lok Sabha and assembly seat in West Bengal will go to polls on Monday. The results for the bypolls will be announced on February 1.
The campaigning for the Ajmer, Alwar and Uluberia Lok Sabha seats and the Noapara and Mandalgarh assembly seats came to an end on Saturday and polling is set to open on Monday morning. Polls in these crucial seats were necessitated after the sitting MPs and MLAs died last year.
In West Bengal, the fight for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly seat is expected to be a straight contest between the ruling All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) and the BJP, which has been struggling to find a foothold in Mamata’s bastion.
Not only is the BJP eyeing the West Bengal bypolls as an opportunity to gain further ground in the state, where it could only send two MPs to Lok Sabha in 2014, it is also hoping for the bye-elections to have a ripple effect of sorts in the upcoming Tripura Assembly polls. On late Friday evening, the BJP had released a list of candidates that will contest the Tripura assembly elections, which are a crucial lynchpin in BJP President Amit Shah’s expansion strategy in the North East.
In Rajasthan, the bypolls are not only a test for chief minister Raje but also for Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot, who has been campaigning aggressively in Alwar and Ajmer. It is being termed as a ‘semi-final’ ahead of the all-crucial Rajasthan Assembly polls scheduled for the second half of 2018.
For Raje, this is a chance to thwart concerns that she is an unpopular CM facing anti-incumbency. For Pilot, it is a prestige battle since from 2009 to 2014 he has been the MP from Ajmer.
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