Kolkata: The BJP, on Monday, announced the candidates for four Assembly constituencies in West Bengal where bypolls will be held on July 10.
The four Assembly constituencies are Raiganj in North Dinajpur district, Bagda in North 24 Parganas district, Ranaghat-Dakshin in Nadia district and Maniktala in Kolkata.
From Maniktala, the party has fielded Kalyan Chaubey, who unsuccessfully contested from the same constituency in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls.
The party candidates from Raiganj, Bagda and Ranaghat-Dakshin will be Manas Kumar Ghosh, Binay Biswas and Manoj Kumar Biswas respectively.
The last two candidates hail from the Matua community, a Backward Class community. They have been given the tickets because the people from the sect constitute a major chunk of total voters in both Bagda and Ranaghat-Dakshin.
The bye-election at Maniktala was necessitated by the demise of the erstwhile Trinamool Congress legislator from there Sadhan Pande.
In the other three constituencies, the erstwhile BJP legislators, namely Biswajit Das from Bagda, Dr Mukut Mani Adhikari from Ranaghat- Dakshin and Krishna Kalyani from Raiganj, all of whom got elected in 2021, had to resign from Assembly as they contested Lok Sabha election on Trinamool Congress tickets.
Although all three of them got defeated this time, bypolls need to be conducted in these three Assembly constituencies from where they had resigned.
As per the performance of the two parties in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, the BJP is better placed in Raiganj, Bagda and Ranaghat-Dakshin and the Trinamool Congress is comfortable in Maniktala constituency.
Trinamool Congress was the first political party to announce candidates for all these four constituencies. Later, the Left Front announced candidates from three constituencies — Bagda, Ranaghat-Dakshin and Maniktala, while leaving the Raiganj seat for Congress.
–IANS