West Bengal by-polls: Voting underway in four assembly seats

Voting for by-polls in Khardah, Santipur, Dinhata and Gosaba assembly seats is underway in West Bengal.

The voting began at around 7 am and will continue till 6:30 pm on Saturday.

Long queues of voters were seen outside the polling booths in North Parganas (Khardah) and Cooch Behar (Dinhata) this morning.

Santipur and Dinhata seats fell vacant after BJP MP Jagannath Sarkar and Nishith Pramk resigned from the assembly, respectively.

Whereas, elections on the other two seats are being held as All India Trinamool Congress' (TMC) MLAs Kajal Sinha (Khardah) and Jayanta Naskar (Gosaba) died due to COVID-19.

There is a tough fight between the BJP and the TMC for retaining the seats they had and capturing the other two.

TMC leader Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, who had resigned from the Bhabpur constituency to facilitate Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's election to the Assembly, is fighting from Khardah.

The Mamata Banerjee-led TMC registered a landslide victory in polls held earlier this year, winning 213 seats in the 294-member West Bengal assembly. The BJP emerged as the second-largest party with 77 seats.

Other than West Bengal, voting is underway in three parliamentary seats and 26 other assembly constituencies in various states across the country today.

The results of these polls will be announced on November 2.

"The Commission has reviewed the situations related to the pandemic, flood, festivals, cold conditions in certain regions, feedback from concerned States/UT and taken into consideration all facts and circumstances and it has decided to hold bye-elections to fill vacancies in three Parliamentary Constituencies of UT of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu; Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh and 30 vacancies in Assembly Constituencies of various States," read the Election Commission of India's press note released on September 28.

( With inputs from ANI )