The by-election in the Madarihat Assembly segment, scheduled for November 13, has become a prestige fight for the party that faces the challenge of retaining the seat as the Trinamul Congress has made significant inroads into the area in recent months.

Out of six Assembly seats, where bypolls will be held on November 13, Madarihat is the only constituency which the BJP had won in 2021, and also in 2016.

The TMC is desperate to wrest the Madarihat (reserved for Scheduled Tribes) seat from the BJP to have an “official” MLA in Alipurduar, a district where the ruling party had drawn blank in the 2021 Assembly polls.

“People of Madarihat have backed us since 2016. But we cannot ignore that our margin has come down in the last Lok Sabha polls. Now that the bypoll has been announced, we have sent specific instructions to booth-level leaders that all efforts must be made to ensure our win,” said Manoj Tigga, the BJP MP of Alipurduar who also heads the party in the district.

The bypoll was necessitated by Tigga's resignation as an MLA from Madarihat following his victory from the Alipurduar Lok Sabha seat.

In 2021, Tigga had defeated the TMC candidate by 29,685 votes.

However, in the Lok Sabha polls this year, BJP's lead margin came down to 11,093 votes in the Madarihat Assembly segment.

The Assembly constituency, sources said, has 226 booths with 2,20,101 voters. It covers the entire Madarihat block and some areas of the Banarhat block in the neighbouring Jalpaiguri district.

Political veterans in Alipurduar said tea garden dwellers determined the election results in Madarihat.

“This is because the constituency has 28 tea estates which together have 99 booths with one lakh voters,” said a senior political leader.

He pointed out that it had been found over the years that the voters tended to favour a party en masse. “This is the principal reason for the BJP's two successive wins. But this time, the party is perturbed because its lead margin has declined by almost two-thirds in the Lok Sabha polls vis-a-vis the Assembly election,” the leader added.

BJP insiders said the TMC government's initiatives for tea garden workers, which included land rights and free houses, and other welfare schemes, put the saffron camp under further pressure.

“We do not have much to boast before the tea estate workers as the central government hasn't done anything exemplary for them. Even the corpus fund of ₹1,000 crore announced by the Centre for the improvement of women and children has not been spent in this region,” said a BJP functionary.

Apart from Darjeeling and Kalimpong, Alipurduar is the only district where the TMC did not win any seats in 2021.

Although Suman Kanjilal, the BJP MLA of Alipurduar, joined the TMC, he is officially considered a BJP legislator. Kanjilal is the chairman of the Assembly's public accounts committee.

On Friday, Prakash Chik Baraik, the district TMC president, reached Birpara for the campaign. He painted graffiti for the party and talked to people about the initiatives taken by the Mamata Banerjee government.

“Tea workers and their families are well aware of what the chief minister has done for them, even after most of them voted for the BJP. We believe they will support us this time. Unlike BJP leaders, we deliver and don't make hollow promises,” Baraik, who is also a Rajya Sabha member, said.