The Election Commission of India on Tuesday announced bypolls to six Assembly constituencies in Bengal on November 13.

Political watchers expect the bypolls to serve as an indicator of the ruling Trinamool Congress’s current standing in Bengal amid the unprecedented political challenge from the undying protests in the wake of the RG Kar tragedy.

The results for the six seats will be declared onNovember 23.

On Monday, as leaders poured in at her 30B Harish Chatterjee Street residence in Kalighat for a post-Vijaya Dashami gathering, chief minister Mamata Banerjee kept instructing them to plunge headlong into campaign mode, essentially to recover ground lost to the RG Kar fallout since mid-August.

“Five (Taldangra, Sitai, Naihati, Medinipur, and Haroa) of the six have been seats won by Trinamool anyway. Only Madarihat had seen a BJP victory in 2021. Everything will be done to ensure we win all six this time,” said a Trinamool veteran, asserting that the party remains strong enough to win convincingly in all the seats.

He said that Mamata would spearhead the campaign and mount a counteroffensive against the state’s Opposition, which according to Bengal’s ruling party has been trying desperately to fish in waters troubled by RG Kar and the wider public sentiment it generated in several sections of the people.

“The results on November 23 should extinguish all doubts, and silence the naysayers hoping that there would be a drastic decline in her (Mamata’s) electoral fortunes on account of the political misuse of the RG tragedy,” he added. “Anything less than five out of these six should be deemed a major upset, which will not happen,” he said.

Ten of the 294 seats of the Assembly needed bypolls by the end of this summer. Vacancies in all but Maniktala were created by MLAs becoming candidates for the Lok Sabha polls.

In the July 10 bypolls to Bagda, Maniktala, Raiganj, and Ranaghat Dakshin, Trinamool had won all four. That was weeks after its 29-seat Lok Sabha triumph in the general election.

But a lot is believed to have taken place politically in Bengal since August 9, when the rape-and-murder at RG Kar came to light, followed by countless allegations against the ruling dispensation of complicity and of attempted cover-up.

“While by-elections in the Assembly to a handful of seats are anyway expected to go in favour of the ruling party, these are elections that would be conducted by the ECI, with full-fledged deployment of central forces, and are expected to be as fair and free as possible,” said a Trinamool MP.

“The voting patterns in these by-polls, especially in the urban or semi-urban pockets, should be an important indicator,” he added. “There are fears that the RG Kar fallout dented us hard in urban, semi-urban, peri-urbancentres.”

Even before this debacle, Trinamool did fare poorly, despite the statewide sweep, in a vast majority of urban areas in the general election this summer, trailing substantially in 69 of the 125 civic bodies.

The BJP and the CPM have been relentless in their pressure on the state government since the RG Kar fiasco.

Despite the unwillingness of the agitating medical fraternity to accept political support from mainstream parties, the CPM, the BJP and the RSS have endorsed their support for the agitators.

The Bengal BJP sounded bullish. “RG Kar and several other recent incidents of heinous crimes against women have revealed the true nature of the chief minister and her regime.... The people of Bengal are observing closely and will respond accordingly,” said the BJP’s chief spokesperson for Bengal, Samik Bhattacharya.

CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said Trinamool has been a placeholder to the larger sections of the Bengal electorate in recent elections, because the people here want to keep the BJP out and were unable to view the other options as credible alternatives.

“In these two months, there has been a change in the mentality of the people (towards Trinamool) as the civil society has openly protested against the wrongdoings of this regime,” he said,referring to what the Left perceives as its revival in the movements.

“But we need to see whether this will materialise into an actual, electoral difference,” added Chakraborty.