This constituency has voted to keep its cosmopolitanism and heterogeneity intact, residents said on Sunday while reacting to Trinamul’s victory from the seat by around 30,000 votes.

Local Trinamul workers and leaders are known to residents of all pockets of Bhowanipore, a fact that evoked confidence among voters to vote for the party, many residents said. BJP’s workers can be seen working in only a handful of places.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, two-time MLA from Bhowanipore, did not contest from the seat this time. The BJP had used much of its resources in its attempt to win the seat in Mamata’s backyard. The chief minister is a voter in the constituency.

Union home minister Amit Shah had himself campaigned for the BJP candidate from Bhowanipore, Rudranil Ghosh.

“The kind of margin by which Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay has won from Bhowanipore shows that people of all religions, castes and communities have voted for Trinamul. It would not have been possible to win by such a huge margin if everyone did not vote for Trinamul,” said Deepak Bharti, a state government employee and a resident of Chakraberia.

Mamata had repeatedly mentioned in her campaigns how a group of BJP leaders, outsiders without any knowledge of Bengal’s culture and society, were coming to the state to campaign. Wednesday’s election results
suggested that Bengal’s voters agreed with what she had said, residents pointed out.

Vicky Shaw, a real estate consultant who lives near Debendra Ghosh Road, said the BJP’s ploy to divide communities had failed in Bhowanipore and also across Bengal.

“People will only vote for those who worked for them. People have seen how local Trinamul workers and leaders helped the families who were quarantined because of Covid. The poor people in slums received benefits from the government when their homes were damaged by Amphan. The ploy to divide people on religious lines did not work. People voted for those who stood by them in difficult times,” said Shaw.

A resident of Bakulbagan, who works for a multinational IT company, too, said Trinamul leaders were visible in the area. But he did not know of any BJP worker in their neighbourhood. “Bhowanipore is a Trinamul bastion. I knew the party would win from here,” the 50-year-old man said.

A constituency that has among its voters Bengalis, Marwaris, Gujaratis, Sikhs and Sindhis, among others, did not go for any division on community lines. Trinamul candidate Chattopadhyay called Bhowanipore a “mini-India”.

He said he believed people of all communities had voted for him. “If Trinamul did not receive votes from a lot of non-Bengalis, we would not have been able to achieve this result,” Chattopadhyay, 77, told Metro on Sunday evening. Trinamul’s victory margin in Bhowanipore has improved compared with the 2019 parliamentary elections and the 2016 Assembly polls.

Mamata defeated her nearest rival – Left-Congress combine’s Deepa Das Munshi – by 25,301 votes in the 2016 elections. But in the 2019 parliamentary elections, Trinamul suffered a blow in the Bhowanipore Assembly segment, where Trinamul’s Mala Roy was ahead of the BJP’s Chandra Kumar Bose by only 3,168 votes. Roy went on to win the Calcutta South constituency.

“I have always lived in Bhowanipore. This time Mamata gave me the opportunity to contest the elections from a place where I have lived all my life,” Chattopadhyay said.

Among Bhowanipore’s residents is a sizeable number of Sikhs. “I think almost all Sikhs have voted against the BJP, and for Trinamul. Many of the Sikhs who live here have continuously organised rallies in Calcutta in support of the farmers’ movement. They were angry with the BJP,” said Hardeep Singh, a property consultant.