The Falta repoll day on Thursday revealed no sign of the Trinamool Congress anywhere across the Assembly seat, two days after the party’s candidate and self-proclaimed “Pushpa”, Jahangir Khan, withdrew from the contest.
The contrast couldn’t have been starker. Falta had been a Trinamool stronghold till April 29, the second phase of the 2026 Assembly polls, flooded with Trinamool flags and party workers at every corner. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the party’s No. 2, Abhishek Banerjee, secured 89.09 per cent of the votes from Falta, an Assembly segment under the Diamond Harbour parliamentary seat.
In a little over a fortnight, the BJP appeared to have taken over Falta’s political space.
The areas were flooded with BJP flags and banners, although a few CPM and Congress flags were also visible. It was hard to spot even a single flag of Mamata Banerjee’s party in the entire Assembly seat. Khan, who excused himself from the fray on Tuesday, did not vote on Thursday. Residents said he was last seen on Tuesday.
As the turnout till 5pm on Thursday crossed 86 per cent, chief minister Suvendu Adhikari said the peaceful election, conducted in a “festive mood” in Falta — the first after the BJP came to power in Bengal — had demonstrated how future elections would be held.
“A re-election in Falta, the first election during our regime, is being conducted peacefully. Even after several attempts, you (mediapersons) failed to show any photographs apart from the festive mood of democracy. Morning shows the day, as Falta has shown today,” said the chief minister, who was in Durgapur on Thursday.
“Around 90 per cent of voters have cast their votes in the repoll. Voters who were deprived of exercising their franchise in the past 10 years have voted in a festive mood,” Suvendu added.
A security guard at the Srirampur Paschim Durgapur Primary School in Falta, a booth where Jahangir Khan, the Trinamool candidate who quit from the fray on Tuesday, was supposed to vote but did not on Thursday
On May 19, when Trinamool candidate Khan, said to be close to Abhishek, quit the fray, an embarrassed Trinamool claimed the decision was entirely his.
However, questions surfaced within the party regarding the circumstances in which Khan lost the courage to contest from a place that yielded 89.09 per cent votes for Trinamool in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Around 1.30pm on Thursday, the queue of voters was thin at Srirampur Paschim Durgapur Primary School, the very booth where Khan voted on April 29. His newly constructed three-storey house is located beside the school. Later, his wife came to vote, but Khan did not.
Villagers of Srirampur, including Muslims, openly accused their neighbour Khan of “looting booths” and said they had no objection to voting for the BJP.
Ghulam Hossain Khan, 50, a migrant worker employed in Tamil Nadu, returned to vote before April 29.
“We were threatened that if a single vote was cast in favour of any other party, we would not be spared. Their agent had a hidden camera in his shirt, so I did not dare to vote for the party of my choice on April 29,” he said. “Today I voted for the BJP to give a befitting reply to Jahangir. We are tension-free as the man has fled."
Last month, Khan had called himself Pushpa from the eponymous Telugu blockbuster and used the character’s catchphrase “Jhukega nahin (Won’t bow down)”. BJP workers said that despite heavy deployment of central forces, they failed to open camps in at least 50 booths on April 29 poll day because of threats from Khan aka Pushpa’s gang. That poll was countermanded a few days later and a repoll ordered.
“Today, we are sitting here bravely. Pushpa has vanished. Trinamool, which had prevented us from opening camps, has also disappeared,” said Ranjit Dalui, a BJP worker from Baneswarpur village in Falta.
The impact of Trinamool’s vanished footprint was not limited to Falta. Abhishek Banerjee’s five-storey party office in Amtala, which falls under the Satgachia Assembly constituency, was locked on Thursday. On April 29, the Diamond Harbour MP had personally monitored the elections from that office.
Soma Ghosh, the BJP’s Diamond Harbour organisational district president, said the people of Falta had voted fearlessly on Thursday in a festive atmosphere, unlike on April 29.
“Today, Trinamool is nowhere because people have rejected them. Members of the minority community also voted for us. Their voting rights had been snatched by Trinamool led by Jahangir Khan. These people did not allow people to vote freely for 10 years,” Ghosh alleged.
Trinamool spokesperson and Beleghata MLA Kunal Ghosh claimed Trinamool workers had been threatened and forced to leave Falta in recent days. “The candidate withdrew, so why would party workers go there on Thursday?” he asked. “Many of our workers had been threatened and forced to leave as well.”
Result of the repoll will be out on May 24.