Calcutta, June 5: Mamata Banerjee has won the Howrah battle that has reaffirmed a lesson the chief minister has been trying to unlearn: she needs an ally as a cushion for the war of 2014.

The chief minister’s handpicked candidate, former footballer Prasun Banerjee, defeated the CPM’s Srideep Bhattacharya by 26,965 votes in the Howrah Lok Sabha by-election.

At first glance, the result carries some features that should make Mamata unhappy. The victory margin has come down from 37,392 votes in 2009 when Trinamul fought the then Lok Sabha elections in alliance with the Congress. The party’s vote share has come down in urban pockets of Howrah.

The latest margin looks even less impressive if an imperfect comparison is made with the 2011 Assembly results. The Assembly segments that make up the Howrah Lok Sabha seats had then thrown up a combined lead of 1.84 lakh votes for the Trinamul-Congress alliance. But a Lok Sabha poll cannot strictly be compared with Assembly polls.

Even if such a comparison is made, the big picture does not look bleak for Trinamul: the overall mood in Howrah continues to be as anti-Left as that in Bengal in 2011 and worse than that in 2009.

Although the victory margin may not have pleased Mamata, she should be happy with the bypoll result as there has not been any perceptible change in the share of the Left and anti-Left blocs.

If the vote percentages of the Congress and Trinamul in the Howrah bypoll are added, the combined share will be around 54 per cent. In the 2011 state elections, the Congress-Trinamul alliance had cornered over 54 per cent of the votes cast in the Assembly segments that make up the Howrah Lok Sabha seat.

“This means the state’s political preference has not changed and the quantum of anti-Left votes has not dropped… This should be a good news for the anti-Left parties,” said a CPM insider, although the Left appeared to have arrested its steady slide.

Besides, Mamata has managed the bypoll victory in the middle of the Saradha scandal and two years of incumbency. Neither the deposit repayment default crisis nor two years of incumbency appears to have had a deep impact on the bypoll. If the panchayat polls reaffirm the trend, Mamata can emerge as a “teflon” leader on whom no charge sticks.

The bypoll victory will also put her in an advantageous position before the next Lok Sabha polls as it will give her a leverage to bargain with potential alliance partners.

While it will be difficult for Mamata to join hands with BJP before the polls in view of her support among the minority community, there is little doubt that the BJP’s absence from the Howrah fray helped the ruling establishment.

Mamata, however, contested such suggestions and said dummy candidates fielded by the BJP cut into Trinamul votes.

“The people of Howrah have given us strength as we fought and won the battle on our own. This is a verdict in favour of ekla cholo re (go it alone),” Mamata said immediately after the result was declared.

“This is a new arithmetic… This won’t tally with earlier equations,” she added as she took pride in Trinamul retaining the Howrah Lok Sabha seat without an alliance with the Congress.

She sought to hammer home the point on a Facebook post, too. “This time we have fought parliamentary by-election at Howrah all alone. A new era is born,” Mamata posted on the site.

But the Congress factor was playing on the minds of Trinamul leaders, which came out in the form of focus on the victory margin.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Ambika Banerjee, of the Trinamul-Congress alliance, had beaten CPM’s Swadesh Chakraborty with a margin of 37,392 votes.

Sources close to Mamata said that she was expecting Prasun’s victory margin to surpass that of his predecessor and she tried her best to achieve that feat.

“The reason that her calculation went wrong was her underestimation about the extent to which the Congress candidate could draw votes even without an alliance with Trinamul,” said a party insider.

Belying Mamata’s expectation, Congress candidate Sanatan Mukherjee polled 96,727 votes (10.1 per cent of total votes polled). Had there been an alliance between the Congress and Trinamul, the victory margin would have rocketed.

More important, had the BJP entered the Howrah fray, the going would have turned tough for Trinamul. In the 2014 general election, a resurgent BJP is certain to eat into the anti-Left vote in Bengal — which makes it all the more important for Mamata to find an ally that can act as a cushion.