West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was leading against Bharatiya Janata Party’s Suvendu Adhikari in the Bhabanipur constituency, as the counting of votes in the 2026 Assembly elections was underway on Monday.

As of 1.10 pm, Banerjee was leading by more than 17,000 votes after seven of the twenty rounds of counting, according to Election Commission data. She was briefly trailing in the second round of voting.

However, Adhikari was ahead by more than 2,200 votes in Nandigram after five of the eighteen rounds of counting against TMC’s Pabitra Kar, as of 1.10 pm.

As of 1.25 pm, there were 29 constituencies where the Election Commission had shared data for two or less rounds of counting.

Follow Scroll’s coverage of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections here.

Nandigram was the high-profile contest between Banerjee and Adhikari in the 2021 Assembly elections, when the two faced each other directly and the BJP leader defeated her.

Following that loss, the chief minister was elected to the Assembly through a bye-poll victory in Bhabanipur later that year, which she has represented since 2011, barring that brief interval.

Adhikari, once a close aide of Banerjee, joined the BJP in 2020 and is currently the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly.

Both seats have also been under scrutiny in discussions around electoral roll revisions. Analyses by...

Read more