Bengal bypoll: BJP’s star campaigners includes Sukanta Majumdar, Suvendu Adhikary, Dilip Ghosh, Smriti Irani among others

Byelections in four more Assembly constituencies – Khardah, Santipur, Dinhata and Gosaba – will be held on October 30. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will have 20 star campaigners – including state party chief Sukanta Majumdar, former state party chief Dilip Ghosh, leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, among others.

The list of star campaigners were submitted to the Election Commission as per rules. The BJP’s star campaigners’ list also includes Union ministers Smriti Irani, Giriraj Sinha and Pratima Bhowmick and Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Four ministers of state of the Central government from West Bengal are also on the list – Nisith Pramanick, Subhas Sarkar, John Barla and Santanu Thakur. Also on the list are Rahul Sinha, Amitava Chakraborty, Debashree Chowdhury, Rupa Ganguly, Agnimitra Paul, Locket Chatterjee, Arjun Singh, Samik Bhattacharya and Mafuza Khatoon.

For Khardah, Trinamool candidate Kajal Sinha had died even before the results were announced. Trinamool had won the seat. Trinamool’s Gosaba candidate Jayanta Naskar had died after the results, and he had sworn in as the MLA. Two other seats – in Cooch Behar’s Dinhata and Nadia’s Santipur – both BJP’s winning candidates Nishith Pramanick and Jagannath Sarkar – had given up their Assembly seats as they wanted to continue being MPs as they had been elected in 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Results for these seats will be out on November 2. The last date for filing nominations is October 8, last day for nomination scrutiny is October 11 and the last date for nomination withdrawal is October 16.

The EC has also directed that a maximum of 200 people can be present for poll campaign in a closed area, and this can be a maximum of 500 people in case of open space. In case of star campaigners, the number can be a maximum of 1,000 people. In case of campaigning on roads, the number can be only 50.

Byelections for three constituencies – Bhawanipore, Samsergunj and Jangipur – were held on September 30, and results were out on October 3. All three were won by Trinamool Congress. This includes Mamata Banerjee’s seat Bhawanipore, where she won by a record margin.