Anit Thapa can afford to put up a brave face although Trinamool Congress's Gopal Lama, who was backed by the hill leader's Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha (BGPM), lost the Darjeeling Lok Sabha.

Trinamool has never won the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Amar Singh Rai of Trinamool enjoyed the support of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha's Binay Tamang faction, of which Thapa was the general secretary, in the Darjeeling segment.

That year, Trinamool bagged 1,02,702 votes from the three hill Assembly constituencies of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong.

In 2024, Lama polled 1,65,494 votes in the three hill Assembly segments, which is higher by around 62,000 compared to the 2019 result.

Raju Bista of the BJP won the Darjeeling seat in 2019 and 2024. His vote share has dipped in the Darjeeling hills and the entire Lok Sabha constituency.

If Bista's victory margin was a whopping 4.02 lakh in 2019, it has come down to 1,78,525 this time.

The BJP’s vote share in the hills has plummeted by around 79,000 from 3.38 lakh in 2019 to 2.58 lakh in 2024.

In the campaign for the just-concluded polls, Thapa ensured that no Trinamnool flag or the pictures of the ruling party's leaders were used in the hills. Many believe such a move was to negate the “trust deficit” that hill people had with Trinamool, which has been more pronounced since the Mamata Banerjee government crushed the 2017 Gorkhaland agitation.

Thapa, instead, tried to project Lama as a candidate of the BGPM in the hills.

“With absolute control of the administration of local bodies in the hills and the BJP's failure to deliver on previous Lok Sabha election promises, Thapa did manage to increase the vote share of Trinamool in the region though it was not enough,” said an observer.

In the 2019 general election manifesto, the BJP had promised tribal status for 11 hill communities and a permanent political solution (PPS) for the region. None of the promises has been fulfilled.

A BGPM leader told this newspaper that the party had hoped that Lama would lead at least in the hill Assembly segments. “If Lama had lost because of the votes in the plains, it would have been acceptable to us,” said the BGPM leader.

The BGPM does not wield clout in the plains of the Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency.

Bista, the winner, said there was not much significance in discussing the victory margin. “If they (BGPM) see a victory in their defeat just like the Congress leaders feel at the national stage, I have little to say,” said Bista.

The Darjeeling MP said there was a dip in the voting percentage in the constituency this time. “Moreover, around two per cent of the votes from the CPM and the Congress went to the TMC across Bengal this year,” said Bista, who added that he suspected large-scale rigging in the Chopra Assembly constituency.

In Chopra, which is in the Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency, Trinamool led by 92,131 votes. The party trailed in all other six Assembly segments.

“Since they (BGPM and Trinamool) have more panchayat and civic representatives, their votes were bound to increase slightly,” said Bista. “Nevertheless, our vote share in the constituency was more than 50 per cent.”