BJP Leads Bengal Bypolls While the Opposition Splits

The Election Commission of India’s counting site put the BJP ahead in both West Bengal bypolls on October 9. Hasi Rani Rath held a 31,943-vote lead in Nandigram after four of 15 EVM rounds. Shankharavh Sarkar held a 20,257-vote lead in Rejinagar after three.

Those figures will not change who governs the state. They will show whether a split opposition can still gather a vote against a party that already holds the House.

Two Vacant Seats Will Not Change the House

The vacancies were a product of the law on dual mandates, not a collapse of the new government. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari won Nandigram and Bhabanipur in the 2026 assembly election and kept Bhabanipur, the Kolkata seat where he beat Mamata Banerjee by 15,105 votes. Aam Janata Unnayan Party chief Humayun Kabir won Rejinagar and Nowda and kept Nowda.

The BJP took 207 of 294 assembly seats in that election. The All India Trinamool Congress was left with 80. Kabir’s AJUP won 2. Adding Nandigram and Rejinagar, or losing them, does not touch the majority.

THE BENGAL BYPOLL SNAPSHOT

• Counting start: 8 a.m. on October 9, postal ballots and electronically transmitted postal ballots first, then EVMs in 15 rounds.
• October 6 turnout: 80.89% in Nandigram and 80.08% in Rejinagar, as recorded by the Commission.
• Force mix: 71 companies of central forces were deployed for polling day.
• Halls: Nandigram at Kabi Sukanta Secondary Teacher’s Training Institute; Rejinagar at Berhampore Girls College, per the chief electoral officer’s October 8 note.

West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Neelam Meena had reviewed the arrangements in late September. The Commission described the October 6 poll as more or less peaceful. Opposition parties asked for a fresh poll and said agents were pushed out of booths. The BJP said the day was peaceful.

Rejinagar’s Anti-BJP Vote Is Split Five Ways

Rejinagar, in Murshidabad, is a seat where more than 65% of voters are Muslim. Kabir had held it as a personal base. On the Commission’s own sheet, that base was not travelling intact to his son.

The Rejinagar count after three EVM rounds put Sarkar, a former BJP district president, well clear of every other ticket. Golam Nabi Azad, listed on the ballot as Golam Nabi Azad (Robin) of AJUP, was second. Congress, both Trinamool factions and the CPI(M) were further back.

REJINAGAR AFTER THREE OF 15 EVM ROUNDS

Add Azad, Kafi, Chowdhury, Sayeed and Saikh together and those five still trail Sarkar by 16,060 votes on the rounds already posted. That is the mechanical fact under the noise. A Hindu BJP nominee leading in a Muslim-majority seat is being read in some quarters as a community swing. The same sheet supports a duller account: the anti-BJP vote was listed under five parties, and none of them was close.

Congress candidate Abdullahil Kafi asked the Commission to stop the count and order a fresh poll, saying the BJP nominee had been allowed into a restricted EVM area and that the poll had been rigged. Those claims had not been upheld when the third EVM round went up. The Returning Officer still had 12 EVM rounds to post.

Mamata’s Camp Backed Congress After Its Nominee Quit

Nandigram was supposed to be Trinamool’s reply in the seat where Adhikari beat Banerjee by 1,956 votes in 2021 and won again in 2026 with 127,301 votes, 9,665 ahead of TMC’s Pabitra Kar. It did not stay that way.

On September 18, Sanchita Pradhan Dey, the nominee of Banerjee’s faction, withdrew after a meeting with Adhikari at Nabanna. Hours later Banerjee said her camp would back Congress candidate Milan Pradhan and would not put up a replacement.

We are ready to fight it out. I want the BJP to go from India. Our full solidarity is with the INDIA alliance.

Mamata Banerjee, former West Bengal chief minister, press conference, September 18, 2026

The same day, Pradhan was arrested in old cases tied to the 2007 Nandigram land agitation. Calcutta High Court later granted him interim bail for three weeks ending October 21 so he could campaign. Justice Krishna Rao also rejected a plea to cancel Rath’s nomination over alleged gaps in her affidavit.

Ritabrata Banerjee’s rival camp still fielded Ehteshmul Haque under the Democratic Trinamool Congress label. The CPI put up Santi Gopal Giri. Banerjee’s faction was not on the Nandigram ballot at all. The Congress ticket became the vessel for her remaining cadre, and a second Trinamool name sat beside it with a different symbol.

Kabir Won Rejinagar by 58,876 Votes in April

Four and a half months before this count, Kabir had not needed a coalition. He took 123,536 votes and a 58,876 margin over BJP candidate Bapan Ghosh, 51.98% of the vote, with Trinamool’s Ataur Rahaman third on 41,718. He also won Nowda. He resigned Rejinagar and sent Azad in.

HOW REJINAGAR MOVED FROM THAT WIN TO THIS BYPOLL

1. April 2026: Kabir wins Rejinagar and Nowda on the AJUP ticket and keeps Nowda.
2. September 9, 2026: Azad files nomination, with his father beside him.
3. September 21, 2026: Kabir says he will not campaign, citing arrests of workers, and says Azad will stay off the trail too.
4. October 6, 2026: After voting, police detain Kabir at the party office and hold him about 12 hours.
5. October 7, 2026: Kabir, in tears, says the BJP will win Rejinagar and that he will leave electoral politics.

Murshidabad Superintendent of Police Sachin Makkar said Kabir was neither a candidate nor an authorised agent and could not move as he had been doing. Police accused him of trying to influence voters. Kabir said officers had forced AJUP agents from booths. Azad said people could not vote and that the BJP would win because the poll was not fair.

On October 7 Kabir went further. “The BJP will win Rejinagar. But this is not the people’s verdict. The police and administration have stolen the election,” he said. He also said Adhikari had told him months earlier that Azad would win by about 30,000 votes, a remark Adhikari’s office did not confirm on the record in the material reviewed for this piece. He said he would not sit in the Assembly while Adhikari remained chief minister.

A personal vote can stay with a symbol when a leader vacates a seat. It can also stay with the leader and fail to transfer to a son, especially if the local machine spends September in police stations and October in a fight with the station house. The third-round gap is the measure of that transfer so far, not a closed finding of theft.

Who Is Hasi Rani Rath in the Nandigram Bypoll?

Hasi Rani Rath is the BJP candidate in Nandigram because Adhikari kept Bhabanipur and because her son is dead. Chandranath Rath, an Indian Air Force veteran who worked as Adhikari’s personal assistant, was shot on May 6 in Madhyamgram, two days after the assembly results. The CBI later took over the case. She told television she wanted life terms for the killers and called the murder revenge for Banerjee’s loss in Bhabanipur, a charge the other side did not accept.

The party put the mother on the ballot in the chief minister’s old seat. The Commission’s Nandigram page, after four EVM rounds, showed her 31,943-vote lead after four rounds over Pradhan, with the rest of the field in the low thousands or below.

NANDIGRAM AFTER FOUR OF 15 EVM ROUNDS

Adhikari’s 2026 Nandigram win was competitive. This bypoll, on the rounds posted by late morning, was not. Rath’s lead is larger than a simple rerun of his 9,665-vote margin, and Haque’s 229 votes show how little the rival Trinamool label was pulling in Adhikari’s base. Nandigram has been Adhikari’s seat through the 2021 clash with Banerjee and the 2026 rematch. The bypoll tests whether that hold survives when his name is not on the slip and his aide’s mother is.

Police Detained Kabir Hours After Polling Began

The flashpoint that will follow these seats into any petition sits in Rejinagar, not in the Nandigram round sheet. Kabir had gone to a party office about 700 metres from a polling station. Video from the scene showed officers taking him by the shirt to a vehicle. He was released after about 12 hours.

Adhikari’s line was institutional. “Everyone should abide by the law. What he did was very harmful for democracy,” the chief minister said. He added that even he could be detained if he broke polling rules. Kabir, on polling day, had said it was not voting and that “Suvendu’s police” was creating trouble, claiming 64 people, all Muslims, had been arrested over two months.

WHAT OFFICIALS SAID AND WHAT THE OPPOSITION ALLEGED

• The Commission: Polling on October 6 was more or less peaceful, and counting began on schedule at 8 a.m. on October 9.
• The BJP: The poll was peaceful, and Kabir was not an authorised agent entitled to move from booth to booth.
• AJUP and Congress: Agents were removed, voters were blocked, and in Rejinagar the BJP candidate entered a restricted counting area.
• The police: Kabir used abusive language, tried to influence voters, and was held on that basis by Rejinagar IC Anjan Barman, with SP Sachin Makkar defending the action.

Those four versions will not be settled by a lead after three rounds. They are the record a court or the Commission would have to weigh if a repoll petition is pressed. They are also the climate in which AJUP’s vote fell from 123,536 in April to 8,109 on the early bypoll sheet, a drop that opposition lawyers will call suppression and the ruling party will call a lost transfer.

The Commission Froze the Trinamool Name and Symbol

The opposition that faced these two ballots was not the party that ran West Bengal for 15 years. In June, 58 rebel MLAs backed expelled leader Ritabrata Banerjee as Leader of the Opposition instead of Banerjee’s choice, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay. The Speaker recognised Ritabrata. The fight then reached the Election Commission as both camps claimed the All India Trinamool Congress name and the flowers and grass symbol.

The Commission froze both for the bypolls. Banerjee’s group was told to contest as Mamata All India Trinamool Congress with a football player symbol. Ritabrata’s group became Democratic Trinamool Congress with an envelope. Banerjee called the freeze a black day and said, “I cannot leave All India Trinamool Congress until I leave this world.” She also said, “We will never bow down our head and we will bounce back.”

In Nandigram her camp then had no candidate of its own. In Rejinagar it did, Rabiul Alam Chowdhury, and he was fourth on the early sheet, behind even Congress. The envelope ticket was sixth. The party that once owned the anti-Left space in Bengal was on these ballots as two temporary names, a Congress proxy, a Left rump and Kabir’s whistle-party family ticket.

The BJP’s 207-seat majority is not on the table. What is on the table is whether that opposition, under those labels, can still concentrate a vote in Adhikari’s old fortress and in a Murshidabad seat Kabir won with a 58,876-vote cushion in April. After four EVM rounds in Nandigram and three in Rejinagar, the Commission’s own numbers say it has not. The Returning Officers still have 11 EVM rounds to post in Nandigram and 12 in Rejinagar before Form-20 is signed.