West Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Dilip Ghosh on Saturday said that if his party comes to power in the state, they would schedule elections in a single phase. He was speaking at one of the BJP\u2019s \u201cParibartan Yatra\u201d in Balurghat in West Bengal’s Dakshin Dinajpur district. “We’ll conduct polls in a single phase. It is a matter of honour,” Ghosh said.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora announced an eight-phase election for West Bengal<\/strong><\/a>, prompting Trinamool Congress chief and Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee to allege<\/strong><\/a> that the list released was \u201cas per the BJP\u2019s requisition\u201d.<\/p>\n While Ghosh said that it was a matter of pride and honour for the state, Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee too had said the same yesterday, adding that the people of Bengal would give a \u201cfitting reply\u201d to the \u201cinsult\u201d. Reacting to Dilip Ghosh\u2019s comment today, Trinamool Congress MP Sougata Roy said, sarcastically, \u201cI think Dilip-babu <\/em>is not acquainted with the procedure. The BJP does not decide how many phases the elections will be held. The Election Commission decides that.\u201d<\/p>\n The EC on Friday announced election dates for five states \u2013 Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and West Bengal. Only Bengal has an eight-phase election, and Assam has a three-phase election. The three other states have a single phase election.<\/p>\n After the EC\u2019s announcement, Mamata Banerjee had said: \u201cElections in Bihar \u2013 where there are 240 seats \u2013 was held in three phases last year, Assam is having three-phase election this time, even Tamil Nadu which has 234 seats and the CPI(M) government in Kerala that has 140 seats will have election on a single day. But West Bengal will have election in eight phases, for whose benefit has it been arranged this way? Can the Election Commission be a bit rational?\u201d In fact, she had also hinted that the eight-phase election had been scheduled to benefit the BJP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" West Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Dilip Ghosh on Saturday said that if his party comes to power in the state, they would schedule elections in a single phase. He was speaking at one of the BJP\u2019s \u201cParibartan Yatra\u201d in Balurghat in West Bengal’s Dakshin Dinajpur district. “We’ll conduct polls in a single phase. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1236,"featured_media":13207,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[387,672,752,582,156,201,583,46,403],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-assembly-elections-2021","9":"tag-bjp-paribartan-yatra","10":"tag-cec-sunil-arora","11":"tag-cover-story","12":"tag-dilip-ghosh","13":"tag-election-commission","14":"tag-top-story","15":"tag-trinamool-congress","16":"tag-west-bengal-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13206"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=13206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}