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It’s official! Round 2 of Mamata-Suvendu clash in Bhabanipur this election
TMC fields Adhikari’s former aide against him in Nandigram.
In 2021, Adhikari defeated Banerjee from Nandigram in Purba Medinipur district. (File Photo)
It’s official. The West Bengal Assembly election will once again see a titanic clash between Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her protege-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikari. Unlike five years ago, when the TMC supremo accepted the BJP’s challenge and contested against Adhikari in the latter’s stronghold of Nandigram, and lost by a whisker, this time, it’s the other way round.
A day ago, the BJP announced to field the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, from his traditional Nandigram seat as well as Bhabanipur, which has been represented by Mamata Banerjee for the last 15 years, in a bid to set the stage for a high-voltage contest that would once again redefine the Assembly elections.
On Tuesday, as Mamata Banerjee, flanked by her nephew Abhishek Banerjee and state TMC chief Subrata Bakshi, released the list of 291 candidates at her Kalighat residence, her name figured in the list for Bhabanipur.
“This time we will win Bhabanipur with the maximum number of votes,” Mamata Banerjee said when asked about the challenge posed by the BJP.
The TMC, on the other hand, has decided to field a former aide of Adhikari against the BJP leader in his Nandigram seat.
Pabitra Kar, who was once considered close to Adhikari, joined the TMC on Tuesday morning. Hours later, when the TMC released its candidate list, Kar was named as the party’s candidate for the Nandigram seat – making it another protege-turned-rival contest.
Kar, a former panchayat pradhan of Boyal-1 gram panchayat in Nandigram-2 block of Purba Medinipur district, returned to the TMC in the presence of the party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.
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The TMC, in a social media post, said Kar was “dissatisfied with the BJP’s anti-people stance”.
Kar had followed Adhikari and quit the TMC in November 2020 to join the BJP. Sources said that he played a significant role in consolidating the BJP’s organisational structure in the Boyal-1 area and was believed to have been instrumental in helping Adhikari defeat Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram – Adhikari had won by a slender margin of 1,956 votes – five years ago.
After Mamata’s defeat in Nandigram in the 2021 Assembly polls, senior TMC leader Shovandeb Chattopadhyay vacated the Bhabanipur seat to allow the party supremo to contest the by-election. Mamata won the bypoll with a margin of more than 58,000 votes or nearly 72 per cent of the vote share, and returned to the Assembly.
Five years later, the BJP sees an opening in Bhabanipur.
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Following the revision of electoral rolls during the SIR process in the state, more than 44,000 electors (over 20 per cent) were deleted in the Bhabanipur constituency. The final rolls raised this figure to around 47,000, with about 14,000 names pending for “adjudication”.
The scale of deletions has acquired political significance as it is roughly 11,000 fewer than the over 58,000-vote margin with which Banerjee had won the 2021 bypoll.
TMC leaves 3 seats Anit Thapa in Hills
Meanwhile, the list of 291 candidates released by the TMC has a few surprises and experiments. The TMC has left three Assembly seats – Kalimpong, Kurseong, and Darjeeling — out of the 294 for Anit Thapa’s Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha.
The TMC has retained 135 MLAs and dropped 74. There are 15 other MLAs who have been retained, but their seats have been changed.
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Several senior ministers — Firhad Hakim, Arup Biswas, and Chandrima Bhattacharya — have been renominated from their constituencies.
Olympian and Asian Games gold medallist Swapna Barman has been fielded from Rajganj, while former cricketer Shib Shankar Pal has been nominated from Tufanganj. Actor-politician Soham Chakraborty has been shifted to Tehatta, and party spokesperson Kunal Ghosh will make his Assembly poll debut from Beliaghata.
Among the prominent exclusions from the list are Barasat MLA Chiranjeet Chakraborty, Behala West legislator Partha Chatterjee, and Beliaghata MLA Paresh Pal.
The party also included younger faces like Shreya Pandey from Maniktala and Sirsan Banerjee, son of TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee, from Uttarpara.
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“We will contest 291 seats and win more than 226,” Mamata Banerjee asserted.
In the 2021 Assembly election, the TMC had won 215 of the 294 seats, later raising its tally to 225 through defections and bypoll victories.
(With PTI)
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