Thursday , April 14 , 2011

Grim tidings for 11 ministers

Calcutta, April 13: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee may manage to hold on to his fort in Jadavpur but 11 of his cabinet colleagues may not get re-elected, according to the projections of a STAR Ananda-The Nielsen Company opinion poll.

Although the opinion poll has forecast victories for nine of Bhattacharjee’s colleagues, it has predicted the defeat of industries minister Nirupam Sen, health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra, finance minister Asim Dasgupta, housing minister Gautam Deb and higher education minister Sudarshan Ray Chaudhuri.

The details of 36 seats were released today, out of which the Left is projected to win only 13.

The forecast has been made on the basis of fieldwork carried out across 50 of the 294 constituencies in Bengal. As many as 9,009 respondents — 180 in each constituency — were interviewed between March 24 and April 3.

The forecast for the remaining 14 of the 50 seats surveyed will be announced tomorrow.

Some seats with political significance were also chosen to gauge the mood of the electorate before the six-phase election kicks off in Bengal on Monday.

Among such seats were Singur, Nandigram, Khejuri, Mangalkot (the Trinamul alliance is predicted to bag the four seats) and Sabang (state Congress chief Manas Bhuniya is projected to lose from here).

In Jadavpur, Bhattacharjee is expected to secure around 58 per cent of the vote share, 21 per cent more than Manish Gupta, his former chief secretary-turned-Trinamul opponent.

In the 2006 Assembly polls, Bhattacharjee had secured 61.25 per cent of the votes. But the Lok Sabha polls in 2009 witnessed a decline of around 9 per cent votes in the Assembly segment.

The survey predicts defeat for Sen from Burdwan South, a traditional Left citadel. According to the survey, Sen will get only 37 per cent of the votes, 17 per cent behind the winner.

Mishra is expected to secure only 36 per cent of the votes, 20 per cent less than the winner.

If the actual figures reflect the findings of the survey, the dent in the support base of Sen and Mishra will be glaring. In 2006, the two CPM leaders had bagged over 56 per cent votes.

The survey suggests the presence of the BJP could determine the outcome in at least one seat. In Dum Dum North, the survey projects the Left as the winner, though the percentages are tied at 46 per cent. The BJP is projected to secure 6 per cent votes here, which, according to traditional wisdom, could have gone to a non-Left group if the national Opposition party had not contested.