Singur assembly election results 2021: Can TMC hold fort or will BJP make dent in its bastion?

Mamata Banerjee in Singur (PTI)

Singur West Bengal Assembly (Vidhan Sabha) Election Results 2021: Singur is one of the strongholds of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Singur was the second place where Mamata launched a successful movement against the Left government’s land acquisition for Tata Nano factory. Farmers resisted the land acquisition by the then Left government for the car plant. Mamata stepped in and made it a movement, a successful one. The Left government was forced to backtrack, Tata shifted to Gujarat. After Nandigram, Singur was the second biggest success for Mamata Banerjee. These two movements — Nandigram and Singur —  propelled Mamata to power in 2011, when the TMC ended the 34-year uninterrupted rule of the Left government in Bengal.

Since 1969, the Left has won this seat seven times. The Trinamool Congress wrested this constituency from the Left for the first time in 2001. Since then, TMC’s Rabindranath Bhattacharjee has been representing this seat in the Assembly. A sitting MLA, Bhattacharjee has won from here four times — 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016. However, in this election, Bhattacharjee is contesting from Singur as BJP nominee. He left the TMC and joined the saffron party just months before the election.

In 2016, Bhattacharjee, then TMC leader, had got 50 per cent vote share while the BJP could secure just 7.40 per cent votes. This time, Bhattacharjee is up against Becharam Manna of TMC and Srijon Bhattacharjee of CPI-M. Singur is an assembly constituency in Hooghly district. It falls under the Hooghly Lok Sabha constituency, currently held by BJP. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, BJP’s Locket Chaterjee bagged this seat by defeating TMC’s Ratna De.

Counting of votes will begin from 8 am on Sunday (May 2).