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Updated: Jul 24, 2019 00:37 IST

A Trinamool Congress man died after being brutally beaten up on Monday night in West Bengal’s Hooghly district by alleged supporters of a rival party, the police said.

Lalchand Bag, 37, a TMC worker, was assaulted and left to die by the roadside in Goghat, about 95 km away from Kolkata, the police said. He died in an Arambag hospital.

The number of political killings in Bengal since the declaration of Lok Sabha election results on May 23 has gone up to 20. Since June 2018, at least 43 people have lost their lives in political clashes.

Six persons said to be supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been arrested in connection with Bag’s murder. But the BJP has denied that the six belong to saffron party ranks.

“We have arrested six persons. As many as 21 people were named in the FIR registered on a complaint by the victim’s family. The accused are known to be supporters of the BJP,” said Samar De, officer-in-charge of Goghat police station. Those arrested have been booked for murder.

Local legislator Manas Majumdar of the Trinamool said since the Lok Sabha poll results were declared, several Left workers had switched to the BJP and began threatening TMC supporters in the area.

Bag’s wife Rina, too, alleged that the assailants were now with the BJP but had earlier been with the Left parties.

“My husband was threatened for attending the Martyr’s Day rally in Kolkata on July 21. He was brutally beaten up on Monday,” she claimed.

Biman Ghosh, the president of the BJP’s Arambag unit, trashed the allegation. “Bag was attacked by a rival faction of the TMC. Now they are blaming us,” he claimed.

In a separate incident in Khejuri area of East Midnapore district, a three-year-old girl sustained pellet injuries in her back during a clash between TMC and BJP supporters on Monday night. The child, who was taken to Khejuri block hospital, is out of danger, doctors treating her said.

Ranjit Mandal, the youth BJP president of Khejuri, claimed that TMC supporters had attacked his party’s supporters in the village. But Kanishka Maity, general secretary of TMC’s East Midnapore district TMC, blamed the BJP.