West Bengal: BJP fields Suvendu Adhikari against CM Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur after deletion of 47,000 voters

Kolkata: To take the fight to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s home turf, the Bharatiya Janata Party has fielded its West Bengal heavyweight, Suvendu Adhikari, in Bhabanipur, the constituency that elected the Trinamool Congress supremo to the state assembly in a bye-election a few months after she lost to him in Nandigram in 2021.

Adhikari, a frontrunner for the BJP’s chief ministerial face in West Bengal, will also contest in Nandigram, according to the first list of candidates released by the saffron party on Monday – just a day after the Election Commission announced the schedule of the polls in the state.

Though the ruling TMC has not yet made public any list of its candidates, Mamata is likely to contest from Bhabanipur, which had sent her to the West Bengal assembly in 2011 – the year she had led the TMC in ending the 34-year-long rule of the Left Front in the state – and then again in 2016. She may also contest from another constituency in the state.

A BJP leader said that the party decided to field Adhikari, the Leader of Opposition in the state assembly, against Mamata in Bhabanipur, in order to keep her busy in her own constituency so that she would not spare much time campaigning for the other TMC candidates across the state.

“Mamata Banerjee will be our candidate in Bhabanipur, and she will win the seat by over 50,000 votes. Suvendu will also be defeated by our candidate in Nandigram,” Bratya Basu, a senior TMC leader and a minister in the state government, said. “He (Adhikari) can choose from whichever seat he wants to lose, that can be one or many in number,” Shashi Panja, another minister of the TMC government in the state, said.

The TMC insiders said that the party might field a “surprise candidate” against Adhikari in Nandigram.

It was in Nandigram where an agitation by farmers, spearheaded by Mamata and her TMC, against the proposed acquisition of land for setting up a special economic zone for chemical industries in 2007 and 2008 had set the stage for the end of the Left Front’s rule and the ascent of the TMC to power in 2011. Adhikari was then a close aide of Mamata and played a key role in TMC’s rise from the 2007-2008 agitation in Nandigram. He, however, quit the TMC and joined the BJP in December 2020, just a few months before the April-May 2021 polls. He then beat Mamata in Nandigram in the 2021 assembly elections with a margin of less than 2000 votes.

Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, a senior TMC leader, won from Bhabanipur in 2021, but he resigned, necessitating a bypoll in October 2021. Mamata won the bypoll, beating Priyanka Tibrewal with a margin of over 58000 votes.

The Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal resulted in the deletion of 47,294 voters in Bhabanipur, which had 2,06,295 voters at the beginning of the process. Besides, 14,154 voters of the constituency had been placed in the “under adjudication” category.

Mamata recently said that although a conspiracy by the EC and the BJP had led to the deletion of such a large number of voters from the electoral rolls of Bhabanipur, she would again win in the constituency, even if by a margin of just one vote.

Adhikari, however, said that with the deletion of fake voters and the illegal immigrants from the electoral rolls of the constituency, Mamata had no chance to win in Bhabanipur.