At first glance, the results of Assembly Constituency 25 in the just-concluded elections inWest Bengaldo not seem very different. Anandamay Barman of the BJP won with 166,905 votes, defeating Shankar Malakar of the Trinamool Congress by 1,04265 votes, a substantial number in an assembly election. Malakar had secured only 62,640 votes. Equally interesting is the number of votes the CPI(M) got.

Jharen Roy of the CPI(M) secured 8585 votes and Amitava Sarkar of the Congress 5498 votes. So, clearly, theTrinamool Congresswas the major anti-BJP party, as in much of the state. The only difference is that this North Bengal constituency, a reserved one for SCs, was Matigara-Naxalbari, where the Naxalite movement began in 1967, almost 60 years earlier.

So, six decades after the beginning of the Naxalbari revolt, this is the constituency where the BJP polled the maximum votes in this election( in terms of the percentage of votes polled), about two-thirds. The leftist votes have almost vanished in Matigara-Naxalbari. While the CPI(M) has secured about 4.45 per cent of the votes in the state, and its allies, the Forward Block, the CPI and the RSP, roughly 0.5 per cent, with the ultra-left CPI(M-L) another 0.07 per cent, the birthplace of the movement does not show any leftist support.

Even the SUC (another leftist party) contested, and its candidate, Laxmi Das, secured all of 983 votes. What it does mean is that the Left has vanished from the nursery of the ultra-left movement.

This victory wasn’t a one-off, a result of the anti-Trinamool wave. In 2021, the BJP had won, getting 58 per cent of the vote, the winning margin being 70,848. It was Barman’s first win, with the Trinamool coming second, the Congress third, followed by an independent, the BSP and finally, the SUC, with 1,274 votes.

Barman was third in 2016, behind the Congress candidate Sankar Malakar, who received 41 per cent of the vote and the Trinamool, the runner-up. The Kamtapur People’s Party (KPP), which aims for a separate state, the BSP and an independent followed. There were more NOTA votes than for the SUC.

The Matigara-Naxalbari seat was a new one, beginning life in 2011. The Congress won the seat narrowly with a 6,833 vote margin, and only in 2011 was the Left’s presence visible. The runner-up was the CPI(M), and with 3,391 votes or roughly 2 per cent of the votes cast, was a CPI(M-L) candidate. And that was 15 years ago, over 40 years after the armed rebellion began, lasting over a decade. It was only in the late 1970s that the strife ended, though Naxalism remains an issue in parts of the country even today.

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The writer is national affairs editor, Times Now

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