Bengal BJP leaders took to social media on Sunday to take a dig at the Trinamul Congress which finished fourth in the Tripura bypolls after a campaign led by the party’s all-India general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

In the Tripura bypolls to four seats, the BJP won three and the Congress the remaining one.

From the party’s state co-minder Amit Malviya, to the leader of the Opposition in the Bengal Assembly Suvendu Adhikari, none missed the opportunity to gleefully insult Trinamul.

“The BJP has won 3/4 seats that went to polls in Tripura. Chief Minister Manik Saha won comfortably from the Town Bardowali assembly constituency. But the real news is Mamata Banerjee’s TMC finishing fourth in all the contests and losing deposit. Similar irrelevance awaits her in WB,” Malviya wrote on twitter.

Suvendu, on the other hand, released a series of tweets on Sunday sharing the poll results data from the website of the Election Commission of India to show how Trinamul’s vote share of 2.8 per cent was just a little above the vote share of NOTA at 1.05 per cent.

“I would like to thank the voters of Tripura for rejecting TMC, an 'all in all' corrupt party, which engages in appeasement politics, fans violence, murders democracy, engages in nepotism; serves only the interest of the family that “owns” the party & runs it like a Pvt Ltd firm,” Suvendu tweeted.

While a considerable section of the party celebrated Trinamul’s defeat, many saw lack of taste in the way BJP was trying to highlight the results of a by-poll.

Many within the party, speaking anonymously to this correspondent, said that the state leaders of the saffron camp appeared to be trying to make up for the repeated poll drubbings that they have faced in Bengal.

The saffron camp has not won in a single election, since its claims of coming to power in the state in 2021 received a massive jolt.

Moreover, the BJP has been reduced to the third position in terms of vote share, trailing behind the Left Front, in the consecutive bypolls and civic elections in Bengal.

“Shouldn’t our leaders be focussing on how we might win the polls in Bengal? They boast of defeating Trinamul in Tripura even as our vote share shrinks here (in Bengal) by each day,” a leader in the BJP unit of Bengal said.

Replying to the BJP’s attacks, Trinamul resorted to reminding them of how the saffron camp had gained over 41 per cent of vote share between 2013 and 2018 to wrest power from the CPM in Tripura.

“We will do the same in the coming Assembly polls. Trinamul will come to power in Tripura. Ask the BJP to focus on its factional feuds first,” Trinamul’s spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said.