Several councillors from the ruling Trinamul, it would appear, are more popular than their indomitable party chief Mamata Banerjee after the just concluded Calcutta Municipal Corporation polls as they have been elected by overwhelming majorities, garnering vote shares higher than what the Bengal chief minister earned during her last election victory.

True a civic election cannot be compared to Assembly polls. One, the electorate is far larger in the case of the latter and two, the nature of people's concerns are widely varied. Yet reduced to voting percentages, the numbers tell their own, at times, peculiar stories.

Elected to the state Assembly in a by-election from her home turf of Bhowanipore after losing from Nandigram during this summer’s Assembly polls, Mamata had received 71.9 per cent of the total votes polled, miles ahead of her nearest rival, Priyanka Tibrewal of the BJP. The CPM nominee, Shrijeeb Biswas, received only 3.56 per cent of the votes.

Mamata’s margin till date is the highest winning margin held by any chief minister, besting the previous record held by her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

After Sunday’s polling for the 144 wards of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, Opposition parties have described it as a "farce" with allegations of widespread electoral malpractices, including intimidation of, and assualts on, voters, polling agents, and political rivals _ all eyes are on five councillors who contested on the Trinamul symbol.

They are Ashutosh Das (ward 35), Amiruddin (ward 54), Manzar Iqbal (ward 61), Jiban Saha (ward 57) and Shammi Jahan Begum (ward 64). All of them received over 90 per cent of the votes, indicating that in their respective wards, they are higher in the popularity charts than the chief minister is in her home constituency.

In fact, there are 29 other Trinamul councillors who have surpassed Mamata’s vote share by polling 80 per cent or more. And in 44 other wards, Trinamul nominees received 70 per cent or more votes.

The story is somewhat different in Mamata’s own ward where social worker Kajari Banerjee polled lesser votes than what her more illustrious sister-in-law had got in the Assembly bypoll. Kajari Banerjee could get only 68.96 per cent of the votes.

Among those who breached the formidable 90 per cent mark, Shammi Jahan Begum’s nearest rival from the Congress could manage only 3.48 votes.

A glance at the summary results of wards reveals the huge gap between the Trinamul and the party that has come at the second spot, be it the CPM, Congress or the BJP.

The Left has been reserved about its climbing the vote share ladder and replacing the BJP in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation area. While the Left emerged in the second spot in 65 wards, the BJP has only 47 wards where it is ahead of the Congress and the Left. Despite getting a combined vote share of 11.89 per cent, Left nominees had to forfeit their deposits in as many as 97 wards.

A look at the two seats that the Left has won this time (one each for the CPM and the CPI), the difference between the vote shares of the Left and the Trinamul is not as glaring as it is in the wards where Trinamul has won.

For example, CPI’s Madhuchhanda Deb got 56.38 votes, while the Trinamul nominee got a respectable 37.56 votes. Likewise, CPM’s Nandita Roy had a vote share of 44.15 per cent, just marginally ahead of the Trinamul candidate who received 43.46 per cent of the votes.

On the other hand, in ward 17, Trinamul nominee Mohan Kumar Gupta polled 11,097 or 87.07 per cent votes. CPM’s Srabani Chakraborty, who came in the second place, received 5.45 per cent votes. In the adjoining ward 18, Trinamul nominee Sunanda Sarkar got 89.07 per cent, votes while CPM, again in second place, managed 9.66 per cent votes.

In some of the wards, for which booth-wise break ups are available, other parties have mostly received votes in single digits or even zero, while Trinamul’s vote is either above 1,000 or just below the four figure-mark.

Trinamul's popularity in Bengal is undisputed. Yet, percentages pertaining to individual vote victory margins tell their own story.