West Bengal Election 2021: Polling for the 8-phase West Bengal Assembly election was finally concluded on Thursday and now the results for the 294 assembly seats are slated to release on May 2 after the counting of votes is concluded.
While 5 states underwent polling for their respective assembly, the West Bengal election became the most publicised and talked about because of the intense face-off between the ruling TMC and BJP.
Significantly, CM Mamata Banerjee left her home seat Bhawanipore to put up a fight against former protege now BJP Leader Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram.
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There was intense campaigning by all parties which later came under scrutiny as the mass rallies were believed to be directly contributing to increasing Covid cases in the state while the pandemic situation took an ugly turn.
While a straight fight is expected between the BJP and the TMC on most of the seats, the CPI (M)-Congress-ISF alliance has made the battle triangular on several seats.
The state has recorded an average of around 80 percent polling.
2016 Results Vs ABP C-Voter Exit Poll Projection
ABP News along with C-Voter conducted an Exit Poll to know the mood of voters in West Bengal. As per the survey, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to make significant inroads in Bengal with bagging as much as a 39 percent vote share as opposed to a mere 10 percent vote share in 2016 Assembly polls.
On the other hand, TMC is set to mostly maintain its stronghold while losing just a 2.6 percent vote share. The bigger shock is predicted for the Congress+Left alliance which is most likely to secure only a 15 percent vote share as opposed to the Congress & Left alliance that had secured a gigantic 38 percent vote share in 2016 Assembly polls.
Seat Range
According to the survey conducted by C-Voter, CM Mamata Banerjee-led TMC is expected to get somewhere around 152 to 164 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly. In 2016, it had secured 211 seats so is projected to lose around 60 seats.
Meanwhile, the BJP, which currently has 3 seats in West Bengal, is likely to bag somewhere between 109 to 121 seats in the state. The Congress and Left alliance will manage to secure around 14 to 25 seats. In the 2016 Assembly elections, Congress+Left had managed to bag 76 seats.
The magic figure required in the state is 147, the minimum seats required for a party or a coalition to stake a claim for the government formation.
The results of the Assembly elections held in five states/UT -- West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry -- will be announced on May 2.
[The present opinion poll / survey was conducted by C Voter Services Pvt. Ltd. The methodology used is Computer Assisted Telephonic Interviews [CATI] for Opinion Polls and Face to face methodology for Exit Poll and the sample size for the same is 2,30,500 (sum of all opinion and exit polls in all states) & the survey was carried out during the period January 1, 2021, until the end of elections in the five states. The same is also expected to have a margin of error of +/-3% at Macro level and +/-5% at Micro Level and may not necessarily have factored in all criteria / aspects and was broadly based upon answers provided by the respondents during the interviews.]