Victory begins at home, Mamata takes Bhowanipore
• Her victory margin is halved from what it was. This time, it is 25,301. In 2011, it was 54,213. But quite a clawback considering Trinamul was trailing by 185 votes in the Bhowanipore
Assembly segment during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Team Narada wins, bar Madan
• Sovan Chatterjee, Subrata Mukherjee, Bobby Hakim, Iqbal Ahmed and Subhendu Adhikari romp home to victory. Hakim even manages a higher margin than 2011 from Calcutta Port. Jailed leader Madan Mitra is beaten by the CPM’s Manash Mukherjee in Kamarhati.
Flyover falls, Trinamul unscathed
• Smita Baksi wins Jorasanko, where the Vivekananda Road flyover cave-in killed 26 people three weeks before the polls. Sashi Panja wins neighbouring Shyampukur. “The flyover collapse did not matter to voters,” says the BJP’s Rahul Sinha. He trailed Baksi by over 6,000 votes.
Syndicates nay, syndicate leaders aye
• Sabyasachi Dutta, Sujit Bose and Purnendu Bose had sulked after the April 25 elections and complained about police excesses. But for all three it’s a Thursday win.
A red dot
• Amid the red ruins, stands Sujan Chakraborty. He beats power minister Manish Gupta by 14,942 votes at Jadavpur.
Festival time
• Mamata Banerjee has called for a “cultural festival” to mark the victory. Song-and-dance celebrations will be held across the state till May 30. Trinamul MLAs will meet at her Kalighat residence on Friday to select their legislature party leader. The new government will be sworn in at Red Road — not Raj Bhavan — on May 27, the day before the Champions League final and two days before the IPL 9 final.
Fingers crossed
• A store in Maniktala is vandalised on Thursday evening because a CPM supporter owns it.
A CPM office is ransacked in Garfa. Many in the police express hope that Mamata — with such a mammoth margin of victory — will allow them to do their job, free and fair.
Mamata here, Roanu there
• Typhoon Mamata swept through Bengal on Thursday. Cyclone Roanu is expected to sweep past Bengal on Friday and bring rain. Roanu, which was off the Andhra coast on Thursday, is expected to move north-northeast along the coastline. It will intensify into a severe cyclonic storm on Thursday night and head towards Bangladesh where it is likely to make landfall between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
