Kolkata | Trinamool Congress candidate Alifa Ahmed won the bypolls to the Kaliganj Assembly seat by a landslide margin of 50,049 votes over her nearest BJP rival Ashish Ghosh, bettering the 2021 winning margin of her father Nasiruddin Ahmed, whose demise in February this year necessitated the elections to the seat in West Bengal's Nadia district, ECI website said on Monday.
After the final round of counting, Alifa bagged 1,02,759 votes compared to Ghosh who finished the race with 52,710 votes, according to figures posted by the Commission on its website.
The Left-supported Congress candidate Kabil Uddin Shaikh came in third with 28,348 votes.
Although Alifa secured about 9,000 votes less than the 1,11,696 votes that her father had bagged in 2021, her winning margin surpassed the 46,987 margin of Nasiruddin four years ago seemingly because of a tighter division of votes between her two closest challengers.
Outside the counting centre, Alifa attributed her victory to "people's love" and thanked them for "reposing faith in Mamata Banerjee's development politics".
"I do not agree that Hindus have not voted for us. We received significant leads from some Hindu-majority areas in my constituency," Alifa said in response to a claim along those lines from BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari.
"We did not target votes from any particular community. We approached all voters and the results show that their clear mandate is to not tolerate any form of communal divide in Bengal," she added.
