2011 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election

2011 West Bengal state general election

18 April 2011 (2011-04-18) – 10 May 2011 (2011-05-10)

All 294 seats in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly
148 seats needed for a majority
Opinion polls
Turnout84.33% ( 2.36 pp)
  Majority party Minority party Third party
 
Leader Mamata Banerjee Pradip Bhattacharya Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee
Party AITC INC CPI(M)
Alliance UPA UPA LF
Leader since 1998 2008 2000
Leader's seat Bhabanipur (By-elected) Did not contest Jadavpur
(Lost)
Last election 26.64%, 30 seats 14.71%, 21 seats 37.13%, 176 seats
Seats before 30 21 176
Seats won 184 42 40
Seat change 154 21 136
Popular vote 18,547,678 4,330,580 14,330,061
Percentage 38.93% 9.09% 30.08%
Swing 12.29 pp 5.62 pp 7.05 pp
Alliance seats 228 228 62
Seat change 198 198 171

Seatwise Map of the Election Results


Chief Minister before election

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee
CPI(M)

Chief Minister after election

Mamata Banerjee
AITC

Assembly election was held in Indian state of West Bengal in 2011 to elect the members of West Bengal Legislative Assembly as the term of the incumbent government was about to end. The election was held in six phases between 18 April and 10 May 2011 for all the 294 seats of the Assembly. In a high voltage election, a voter turnout of over 84% was recorded, the highest ever in the history of Bengal till then.

The Trinamool Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won an absolute majority of seats in the state in a historic win, marking the end of the 34-year rule of Left Front, the longest-serving democratically elected communist government in the world, a fact that was noted by international media. Notably, even the incumbent Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee lost his Jadavpur seat, which was considered an electoral bastion of the CPI(M), to Trinamool's Manish Gupta. Bhattacharjee became the second incumbent chief minister of the state to lose from his own seat, after Congress' Prafulla Chandra Sen's defeat in Arambagh to Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee of Bangla Congress in 1967.