Over 72 per cent residents came out of their homes to vote till 5 pm on Saturday in the four municipal corporations where elections were held for the civic board, pending for almost two years.

The day’s proceedings took turns that are all too familiar in Bengal’s politicalscape _ intimidation, violence, coercion _ although so far in none of the places has the situation spiralled out of control.

"Polling has so far been peaceful. We have taken a note of some disturbances from these municipal corporation areas where outsiders were found standing in voters' queue," the senior official of the West Bengal State Election Commission said.

A voter turnout of 72.02 per cent was registered in Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation till 5 pm, while the percentage in Siliguri, Asansol and Chandernagore were 71.87, 71.67 and 71.49 respectively, he said.

Except for the Siliguri Municipal Corporation, which was run by the Left, the rest were under Trinamul.

"BJP candidates Subhasish Das and Biswajit Mondal in Siliguri have been detained by the police for their alleged involvement in creating problems outside polling booths," the SEC official said.

In Bidhannagar, where seven years ago the voters were witness to the brutal and ruthless machinery of the ruling Trinamul, Saturday’s polling showed nothing much had changed.

In ward 37, Trinamul nominee Minu Das Chakraborty came to blows with the BJP’s Pramita Saha at the polling booth inside the Reserve Bank employees' resident quarters. The trigger for the exchange of blows between the two women candidates was an allegation that the Trinamul had brought outsiders to vote.

One such outsider escaped from Chanchalkumar Girls’ School in ward 27 after being challenged. The voters’ slip he carried revealed the name as Debashish Ghosh, though he had identified himself as Ranjit Das. Another person caught at Salt Lake’s FD block around 11 am, claimed to be a resident of Lake Town across VIP Road and had come for a morning walk. Yet another false voter was nabbed from inside a public toilet where he was hiding.

“We had demanded central forces so that people could give their votes peacefully. The booths are swarming with fake voters. Our workers and the media have caught many such voters. The police is nowhere to be seen,” said Dilip Ghosh, MP and a national vice-president of the BJP.

Former minister and Siliguri Mayor Asok Bhattacharya complained about outsiders at some booths of Siliguri Municipal Corporation’s ward 6, where he is the CPM nominee.

The civic bodies voting on Saturday were in limbo for almost two years as the Covid pandemic and Mamata Banerjee’s calculations on an upset electorate ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls, made her replace the elected representatives by a board of administrators.

These four municipal corporations also assume significance with upcoming elections in over a hundred other municipal bodies across the state scheduled for February 27. Trinamul has already won four of those civic bodies uncontested.