A segment of the Jalpaiguri Lok Sabha seat, it covers the Mainaguri municipality and the Mainaguri community development block. The terrain is flat and alluvial, criss-crossed by rivers like the Teesta and Jaldhaka and lined with tea estates, forest fringes and small market settlements.
The local economy is driven by tea plantations, agriculture and timber, with tourism centred on nearby Gorumara and Jaldapara wildlife zones, Dooars forests and temple circuits. It is linked by road and by rail through New Maynaguri station on the New Jalpaiguri-New Cooch Behar section.
Established in 1951, Maynaguri has seen 18 Assembly elections, including the 2014 by-election, with voters backing different parties in long but distinct phases. The Congress and the breakaway Bangla Congress together won the first seven contests, with the Congress taking five terms and Bangla Congress two before it merged back into the parent party. The Revolutionary Socialist Party, a key Left Front partner, then turned Maynaguri into a stronghold for eight consecutive terms between 1977 and 2011, before the Trinamool Congress and later the BJP edged into contention.
Trinamool opened its account in the 2014 by-election when Ananta Deb Adhikari, who had won in 2011 on an RSP ticket by defeating Trinamool’s Juthika Roy Basunia by 16,276 votes, crossed over to the Trinamool Congress, triggering the bypoll. He retained the seat for his new party that year by defeating his former RSP colleague Dinabandhu Roy by 31,790 votes, and held it again in 2016 by beating RSP’s Chaya Dey (Roy) with an even bigger margin of 34,907 votes. The BJP, which had polled only 3.62 per cent of the vote in 2011 and 14.59 per cent in 2016, finally captured the seat in 2021 when its candidate Kaushik Roy defeated Trinamool’s Manoj Roy by 11,911 votes, signalling a sharp reconfiguration of the local politics
The voting pattern in Lok Sabha elections features this shift. The CPI(M) led the Congress by 20,548 votes in the Maynaguri Assembly segment in 2009, but by 2014 the Trinamool Congress had moved ahead of the CPI(M) by 28,167 votes. The BJP then surged from the margins to head the table in the next two parliamentary elections, leading Trinamool by 14,747 votes in 2019 and by 4,745 votes in 2024, suggesting that the saffron party has tightened its grip in parliamentary contests even as Trinamool has tried to hold on to its Assembly base.
The draft electoral roll for the 2026 Assembly elections lists 234,899 voters for Maynaguri, which is a steep fall of 37,726 compared to the 272,625 registered in 2024. It is an unusual pattern for a seat that is not Muslim-majority, even though the Bangladesh border lies barely 25-30 km away. Earlier, Maynaguri had 264,265 voters in 2021, 250,769 in 2019, 236,663 in 2016 and 198,615 in 2011, indicating steady growth until the post-SIR correction.
The constituency’s social profile is dominated by Scheduled Castes at 71.13 per cent, with Muslims making up 9.60 per cent and Scheduled Tribes 1.31 per cent of the population. It remains overwhelmingly rural at 88.48 per cent, with only 11.52 per cent living in urban pockets.
Voter participation has been consistently high. Turnout stood at 87.84 per cent in 2011, rose to 89.12 per cent in 2016, held at 88.92 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, climbed further to 89.52 per cent in the 2021 Assembly polls and was still a robust 86.33 per cent in 2024.
Maynaguri town lies about 17 km from the Jalpaiguri district headquarters and roughly 60-62 km from Siliguri by road via Jalpaiguri and Maynaguri, with good bus and small-vehicle connectivity. Kolkata, the state capital, is about 550 km away by road and rail, with trains from New Maynaguri or nearby junctions linking it to the state capital. The area is well placed in the Dooars corridor. The Bhutan border town of Jaigaon, opposite Phuentsholing, is about 85-90 km by road from Maynaguri. The Bangladesh border in the Jalpaiguri-Cooch Behar belt lies within 25-30 km, opening cross-border cultural and trading circuits, even though Maynaguri itself has only a modest Muslim share of the population.
Taken together, one Assembly win and two successive Lok Sabha leads in this segment give the BJP a slight upper hand over the Trinamool Congress going into the 2026 contest. The Left Front-Congress alliance has slipped into political irrelevance after securing less than three per cent of the vote in the last two elections. Maynaguri has ensured that no party can take victory for granted, and the BJP’s narrow margins of lead over Trinamool leave enough room for the latter to stage a comeback. That sets the stage for a fierce, closely fought battle between the BJP and the Trinamool Congress in the 2026 Assembly elections, with the outcome likely to hinge on micro-swings among SC voters and the consolidation or fragmentation of smaller caste and community blocs.
(Ajay Jha)
