Kunal Ghosh, the Trinamul leader who has been most outspoken in taking on the RG protesters, has predicted a clean sweep for his party in the bypolls in six Assembly seats in Bengal scheduled for November 13.

And he took potshots at the CPM, which has zero representation in the Assembly and in Parliament since 2019 from the state.

“Six Assembly bypolls. Trinamul will win in all six. 6-0. CPM which is trying hard to be visible in the media and social media, write it down, will again take either the third or fourth spot,” Ghosh wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) handle. “CPM will get 0,0,0,0,0,0, six zeros. Bye.”

Ghosh signed off asking “frustrated vultures” to get to work.

His sarcasm was obviously intended at the section of the Left which has supported the movement by the junior doctors following the rape and murder of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.

Ghosh also took potshots at the protest carnival held on Tuesday – after the Calcutta high court.struck down prohibitory orders clamped by Kolkata Police – alongside the Mamata Banerjee government’s Durga Puja Carnival

Sharing an image from the Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika in another post, Ghosh claimed only 832 people had attended the protest.

“Not a sea of people, but a pond,” he wrote, rebutting the headline.

The by-elections in the six seats – Sitai and Madarihat in north Bengal and Naihati, Haroa, Midnapore and Taldangra in south Bengal – will be held on November 13 along with 43 other Assembly seats across the country. Of the six, except for Madarihat, the remaining are held by the Trinamul.

Though Ghosh declared the rank the CPM would get, he did not predict which party would rank second or third.

CPM leader Sujan Chakraborty refused to comment on Ghosh’s barb.

BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP and spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya declared that in a free and fair election Trinamul would not be able to make a clean sweep.

Samik Bhattacharya X/@SamikBJP

“If people are allowed to vote nobody will vote for the Trinamul,” Bhattacharya said. “The protests that are happening right now are not only for the victim of the rape and murder at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital or the institutionalised corruption. It is against the devastating hegemony that the Trinamul has established all over West Bengal.”

In this summer’s Lok Sabha polls, Mamata Banerjee’s party won 29 of Bengal’s 42 seats with 45.76 per cent of the vote share. The BJP’s vote share was 38.73 per cent but it could win only 12 seats, six below its tally of 2019.

The Congress and the CPM, which went into the Lok Sabha polls in an alliance, had a combined vote share of 11.03 per cent. All the CPM candidates including the party’s state secretary Mohammad Salim lost. The Congress retained one seat, while the former state unit chief, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, lost to former cricketer Yusuf Pathan in his home turf Berhampore.

“The last word is always uttered by the people,” said Subhankar Sarkar, the newly appointed West Bengal Pradesh Congress president. “For a number of reasons we have not been able to convince the people to vote for us. This by-election is an opportunity for us. I would like to tell the people of Bengal to compare the tenure of the Congress with the other parties and then decide.”

Subhankar Sarkar X/@subhankar_cong

The last time that Congress came to power on its own in Bengal was over 52 years ago.

When asked whether Congress was open to an electoral understanding with the Left, Sarkar said: “The bypoll date was announced yesterday. We will hold talks with the rank and file and then take a decision. If the chemistry is missing, nothing works.”