Kolkata | The Trinamool Congress continued its winning streak from the recent Lok Sabha elections by sweeping the West Bengal assembly bypolls on Saturday, wresting Raiganj, Bagda, and Ranaghat Dakshin seats from the BJP and securing a record victory margin in Maniktala.

TMC candidates Krishna Kalyani, Madhuparna Thakur and Mukut Mani Adhikari won the Raiganj, Bagda, and Ranaghat Dakshin seats respectively, while Supti Pandey won Maniktala in North Kolkata.

The bypoll results established that the TMC not only improved on its 2021 assembly election performance, but also significantly swung votes from the recently-concluded parliamentary polls in its favour within a span of less than two months. Polls in the four assembly seats were held on July 10.

The BJP secured the second position in all four seats, while the Left-Congress alliance finished a distant third and lost deposits in two assembly segments.

TMC nominee Supti Pandey won by a record margin of 62,312 votes in Maniktala over her nearest rival Kalyan Chaubey of the BJP, who is also the All India Football Federation (AIFF) president.

Pandey, the widow of TMC minister and three-time MLA from Maniktala, Sadhan Pandey, significantly bettered her late husband's 2021 performance in this seat which he had won by a margin of a little over 20,000 votes.

TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay, who won the Kolkata Uttar parliamentary seat by a margin of over 92,000 votes, had barely managed a lead of around 3,500 votes from Maniktala a little over a month ago.

In cementing her victory by a margin of 33,445 votes from Bagda, 25-year-old Madhuparna Thakur, daughter of TMC's Rajya Sabha MP and Matua community leader Mamatabala Thakur, earned the distinction of becoming the youngest MLA of the West Bengal Assembly, dislodging late TMC leader Subrata Mukherjee from that position.

Thakur also ensured that the TMC made a political comeback after eight years in the Matua-dominated seat which falls under the Bongaon Lok Sabha constituency won by BJP leader and Union minister Shantanu Thakur by a margin of over 73,000 votes in June this year.

The other seat with significant Matua presence, Ranaghat Dakshin, was also wrested from the BJP, ironically by TMC's Mukut Mani Adhikari who had won the seat on a BJP ticket back in 2021.

While Adhikari won the previous edition of the polls by a margin of 16,515 votes, his lead over the nearest rival of the BJP this time was a vastly increased 39,048 votes.

Interestingly, BJP's Lok Sabha MP from Ranaghat, Jagannath Sarkar, had secured a lead of nearly 37,000 votes from the Ranaghat Dakshin assembly segment in the general elections held less than two months ago.

In Raiganj in Uttar Dinajpur district, Kalyani won by a margin of 50,077 votes over his nearest rival Manas Kumar Ghosh of the BJP, effectively swinging nearly one lakh votes in favour of the TMC compared to the recently concluded Lok Sabha poll results from the segment.

In the 2021 state elections, Kalyani, then a BJP leader, had won the seat by a margin of nearly 21,000 votes. But in the 2024 general elections, after defecting to the TMC, Kalyani trailed from the segment by a margin of nearly 47,000 votes and eventually lost the Raiganj Lok Sabha seat to BJP's Kartick Paul.

Poll arithmetic confirmed that Kalyani managed to swing over 97,000 votes in less than two months to win the bypoll following his re-nomination from the Raiganj assembly segment.

The bypolls, close on the heels of the Lok Sabha elections, was a litmus test for the BJP with the party hoping to check its electoral slide, a goal it failed to meet.

Since the 2021 assembly polls, the TMC has won all by-elections in the state, except the Sagardighi bypoll in March 2023, which the Congress had won.

West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee thanked the people for the party's resounding victory.

"We thank the people for their faith in us. We will dedicate the by-election and the Lok Sabha poll victories to the martyrs on our July 21 Martyrs' Day rally," she said.

With this victory, the TMC's tally stands at 215 in the 294-member assembly. It also enjoys the support of three BJP MLAs, who switched over to the ruling party but are yet to resign from the House.

The BJP's official tally in the state assembly has come down to 71 from 77 in 2021.

The assembly segments of Haroa and Naihati in North 24 Parganas district, Sitai in Cooch Behar, Taldangra in Bankura, Madarihat in Alipurduars, and Medinipur in Paschim Medinipur are still vacant since their respective sitting MLAs contested and won the Lok Sabha polls.

Reacting to the party's performance in the bypolls, a state BJP leader said the party would introspect.

"We will review our performance. But the TMC did not allow free and fair elections and there were a lot of irregularities. The ruling party had unleashed a reign of terror," BJP state spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya alleged.

The TMC was quick to counter, dubbing the allegations "baseless".

"The people have rejected the BJP in the last Lok Sabha polls in West Bengal and the same thing has happened in the bypolls. The allegation that by-polls were not free and fair are just excuses to hide their own failures," TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said.

While the bypoll results were a shot in the arm for the TMC which is upbeat with its Lok Sabha poll performance where it bagged 29 parliamentary seats, up from 22 in 2019, the BJP were in for fresh disappointment after its Lok Sabha seat tally came down to 12 this year from 18 in 2019.