KOLKATA: Resounding victories in the Bongaon Lok Sabha and Krishnagunj assembly bypolls came as a face-saver for Trinamool Congress on Monday, leading chief minister Mamata Banerjee to tweet “it’s a miracle result”.Singed by the Saradha fire, stung by the defection of a cabinet minister and hobbled by star general Mukul Roy’s reluctance to lead from the front, Trinamool Congress fought back to secure comfortable winning margins in both seats. It held on to its 2014 Lok Sabha vote share in both seats and even managed to increase its leads.The poll outcome has manifold implications for the ruling party. Any potential setback would have allowed party national secretary Mukul Roy more room to manoeuvre. A visibly-relieved Mamata said, “Trinamool Congress is intact and continues to be a strong party. We are together. We are a united family… They have bowled all the controversies out.”While BJP can draw satisfaction from its sharply-rising vote share, the results also indicate that despite securing significant percentage of Left votes, the party continues to lag behind Trinamool in spreading bases across rural Bengal. In Krishnagunj assembly seat, the party secured 29.28% of votes, more than double the 14% it had secured in the segment during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. In the 2011 Assemble elections it had managed a mere 3%. In Bongaon, BJP’s vote share is now up to 25.17% from 19.22% in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.“BJP has covered a lot of ground between 2011 and 2014, but we still need to keep our head down and work harder for the final battle in 2016,” BJP national secretary Siddharth Nath Singh said. “The three takeaways from the bypolls are that TMC is on a downslide, BJP is rising and vote for CPM is a vote for TMC,” he added.But it remains a fact that BJP’s gamble of parachuting Subrata Thakur as the Bongaon candidate to split the 30% Matua community vote did not go down well with a section of BJP supporters. Subrata is the son of former Trinamool cabinet minister Manjulkrishna Thakur, son of Matua matriarch Boroma. The Bongaon seat had fallen vacant after the death of Manjulkrishna’s elder brother Kapil Krishna Thakur. Manjul had wanted a Trinamool ticket for son Subrata, but the party favoured Kapil Krishna’s widow Mamatabala. Both father and son defected to BJP just before the poll.Trinamool’s comfortable victory was also a result of tactical voting by the minority community. “A large chunk of minority voters favoured Trinamool. In Swarupnagar assembly segment of Bongaon, CPM had a lead of 3,650 votes in the 2014 LS polls. This time, Trinamool has a lead of over 20,000 votes here. So Trinamool’s loss due to its recent troubles was by and large made up by these new voters,” said poll analyst Biswanath Chakraborty.BJP’s inability to eat into Trinamool’s vote pie also underlined the fact that at least in Bengal it is yet to shed its urban tag. The only assembly segment in Bongaon where BJP managed to pull down Trinamool’s vote share by 10% was in Kalyani, an urban township.