Till 5 pm on Friday, the voter turnout in the three north Bengal constituencies of Cooch Behar, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri, stood at 77.57 per cent, though chief minister Mamata Banerjee murmured of “mischief” in the three seats that the BJP had swept five years back.

The Trinamul has made all efforts to reclaim the territory that it had politically inherited from the Left over a decade ago.

“BJP is using the central forces like its party cadre,” Mamata said in an election campaign meeting in Murshidabad’s Jangipur. “I want to ask the Election Commission why only central forces are being utilised on poll duty? Why are the state police being ignored? Can we believe the elections to be free and fair?”

For the Cooch Behar Lok Sabha constituency alone, the central poll panel had deployed around 112 companies of the central armed forces along with state police personnel.

One of the reasons behind the Bengal chief minister’s anger was that Udayan Guha, the state minister from Cooch Behar was kept under a strict watch on the instructions of the central poll panel on Friday.

Though a repeat of the blood-soaked morning from three years ago during the Assembly polls where people lost their lives in a police firing in Sitalkuchi, one of the Assembly segments in the Cooch Behar Lok Sabha from where the junior union Home minister Nisith Pramanik is seeking a re-election, was avoided the poll process was not completely bloodless.

Tension ran high between mainly the supporters of the BJP and the Trinamul, each seeking area domination. The combined number of complaints filed by both the parties against each other ran well over 350 by afternoon.

In some parts of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar, a major showdown between supporters of both the parties was avoided despite minor skirmishes.

“The Trinamul has got a taste of its own medicine,” Pramanik said while the poll process was on.

Barenchandra Burman, elected to the Bengal Assembly from Sitalkuchi on a BJP ticket alleged false voting across booths in his Assembly segment by Trinamul workers. Similar allegations were also raised in Siliguri.

If Mamata’s accusations were at the central paramilitary forces, the BJP pointed fingers at the state police. The BJP’s Dabgram-Fulbari MLA Shikha Chattopadhyay alleged the police tried to arrest her when she was about to enter a booth and could escape only after the local BJP supporters camping in the area intervened. The Election Commission has sought a report about the incident from the district officials.