Avijit De Bhowmik, aka Hippy, was a happy man on Tuesday.

On April 19, after the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections, Avijit, the Trinamool chief in Cooch Behar, organised a victory rally on the same evening for party candidate Jagadish Chandra Burma Basunia, much to the surprise of party members.

On Tuesday, he beamed. “Bolechilam, party jitbe (I had told you, our party, the Trinamool, will win),” said Avijit.

Jagadish defeated the BJP’s Nisith Pramanik by 39,250 votes.

In north Bengal, Cooch Behar is the only seat in which Mamata Banerjee’s party won. The rest of Trinamool’s wins were in south Bengal.

The BJP retained six seats in the region. The Congress, too, managed to retain the Maldaha Dakshin seat, the sole seat that the Grand Old Party won in Mamata’s state.

In 2019, the BJP had bagged seven north Bengal seats and Congress one seat.

In the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP got 30 of 54 seats in north Bengal. Trinamool won 23 seats.

Later, Trinamool’s tally increased to 25 as it secured Dinhata and Dhupguri Assembly seats at the bypolls.

Unlike 2019, when BJP had secured around 46 per cent votes in the region, its poll share dropped by 2 per cent in north Bengal this time. Trinamool, which got around 38 per cent of votes in the last Lok Sabha polls, managed to secure a similar percentage this time.

The poll pundits, however, were surprised at the BJP’s win in Jalpaiguri, a seat which Trinamool had been banking on.

“It is surprising that the chief minister’s prompt arrival in the storm-affected areas in Jalpaiguri to give relief to people didn’t work. Nor did the creation of the new Dhupguri sub-division and two new blocks,” said Soumen Nag, a social researcher based in Siliguri.

He pointed out that the BJP played the polarisation card in the region again.

In Raiganj, Maldaha Uttar and Maldaha Dakshin, minority votes were split as the Congress fielded Muslim candidates.

SKM victory

The Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) won the sole parliamentary seat in Sikkim. Indra Hang Subba, the SKM candidate, secured 1,64,396 votes and won by a margin of 80,830 votes.

The BJP’s Dinesh Chandra Nepal bit the dust at fifth spot.

On Sunday, the SKM, led by chief minister P.S. Tamang, won 31 of 32 Assembly seats. The Assembly and Lok Sabha polls were held on the same day, April 19, in Sikkim.