Mamata Banerjee even lost her home ward of Kalighat

Walk south from the Kalighat Kali Temple in Kolkata into a lane called Harish Chatterjee Street, and you will reach the house Mamata Banerjee has lived in for decades. The polling station that serves it sits inside Mitra Institution, a school on the same street. When the Election Commission of India released the booth-wise count for the 2026 Bhabanipur election, there were 327 votes for Suvendu Adhikari and 224 for Banerjee. Read Full Story It was not an aberration. Banerjee led just 61 of the 267 polling stations in her own constituency, according to Form 20, the final result sheet the Election Commission issues for every seat. Adhikari, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, led 205. The seat result itself was settled on the counting day: Adhikari 73,917 votes, Banerjee 58,812. What the booth-wise sheet adds is the geography of the defeat, which reaches all the way to her doorstep. For a politician whose identity is bound to this patch of south Kolkata, the Kalighat neighbourhood, and the Harish Chatterjee Street house she has never left, Form 20 is a street-level record of how her own ground voted. It shows a constituency that did not so much swing as split, and a home ward that went heavily against her. A CONSTITUENCY SPLIT IN TWO Bhabanipur did not vote as one place. Across the 267 booths, the contest lurched from lane to lane. Booth 46 gave Banerjee 936 votes and Adhikari 18. Elsewhere on the sheet, booth 231 gave Adhikari 699 and Banerjee just 15. The booths Banerjee carried were not narrow wins. Many were among the widest margins on the sheet, dense pockets returning her 600, 700, even 900 votes a station. Her support in Bhabanipur is real and concentrated. It was simply outnumbered. Adhikari's 205 booths spread across far more of the seats, and several of his strongest sat in the wards Banerjee has long counted as her own. KALIGHAT WENT AGAINST HER Kalighat is Ward 73 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. Its nine core polling stations, on Kalighat Road and the lanes around the temple, went to Adhikari by 3,794 votes to 1,223. Banerjee led one of the nine booths at Children's Academy on Rani Sankari Lane, and she led it by five votes. The two booths housed inside the KMC ward office itself, Jai Hind Bhavan on Kalighat Road, recorded 1,089 votes for Adhikari and 232 for Banerjee. Adhikari does not live in Kolkata. He is a resident of Kanthi, a town in East Midnapore. In 2021, he beat Banerjee on her chosen battlefield at Nandigram. In 2026, the booth sheet shows him beating her on her home ground. THE POCKETS THAT HELD Banerjee was not erased from Bhabanipur. In the 61 booths she carried, she often won overwhelmingly, and she also took the postal ballots, 463 to 454. The third-placed candidate, Shrijeeb Biswas, finished far back with 3,556 votes. NOTA drew 829. But concentration is not coverage. Banerjee's vote sat in deep, narrow pools. Adhikari's spread across the constituency, and across Kalighat, leaving her with fewer than a quarter of its booths. THE ROOM NEXT DOOR The Form 20 sheet puts Banerjee's Bhabanipur count at 58,812 votes. At the polling station inside her ward's own office, in the neighbourhood she has always called home, it records the line plainly: Adhikari 697, Banerjee 132. The chief minister had lost the room next door. Ends