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Sayantan Ghosh is an author and a journalist who has covered several elections and written extensively about politics in India. He is the author of The Aam Aadmi Party: The Untold Story of a Political Uprising and Its Undoing and teaches at the St Xavier’s College in Kolkata. His new book, Battleground Bengal: The Political Future of a Fiercely Contested State, maps the political contours of the eastern state, where polls took place across two phases—April 23 and 29. The election was held after the Election Commission of India conducted a Special Intensive Revision of the state’s voter rolls. Ajachi Chakrabarti, a senior associate editor at The Caravan, interviewed Ghosh in between the two phases of voting.
What is your overall sense of how it is going for the major contenders?
There are several narratives. One narrative is built by the national media, which is saying that there is a wave of anti-incumbency that led to the high turnout in the first phase.
But turnout has been high everywhere, because the SIR reduced the total number of voters.
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