West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | TMC fields ex-aide Pabitra Kar against Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram

Kolkata: The ruling Trinamool Congress on Tuesday poached a close aide of Suvendu Adhikari from the Bharatiya Janata Party and fielded him as its candidate in Nandigram assembly constituency in West Bengal against his former mentor, who emerged as the saffron party’s de facto chief ministerial face ahead of the assembly elections in the state.

A day after the BJP fielded Adhikari against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur in Kolkata, in addition to his home turf Nandigram, Pabitra Kar, a saffron party’s leader in Purba Medinipur district of the state, met the TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, and joined the ruling party.

A few hours later, Abhishek and Mamata announced that Kar would take on Adhikari in Nandigram.

The TMC supremo and her heir apparent announced the list of the party’s candidates for 291 of the 294 assembly constituencies in the state. The party left three constituencies in the Darjeeling Hills for its ally, Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha, to contest.

To blunt local dissatisfaction, the TMC, which has been in power since 2011, dropped 74 of its 224 legislators from the list of its candidates for the coming assembly polls, but retained 135, while shifting 15 of them to different constituencies.

“We will win more than 226 seats,” Mamata said, even as she accused the Election Commission of playing “a nice game” to ensure an advantage for the BJP in the assembly elections.

She slammed the EC for arbitrarily changing bureaucrats at the higher echelons of the state government, as well as reshuffling the top brass of the state police, soon after announcing the schedule of polls on Sunday.

“Why are senior officers being transferred just before Eid? Are there plans to trigger riots before elections?”

She alleged that the officials were transferred to facilitate the movement of money and arms for the BJP ahead of the polls. “If something untoward happens, the BJP and the EC will be responsible. If something goes wrong, then they should be answerable.”

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.

Kar always owed his political allegiance to Adhikari. He left the TMC and joined the BJP just a few weeks before Adhikari did so in December 2020. He then played a key role in ensuring the victory of Adhikari against Mamata in Nandigram with fewer than 2000 votes in the April-May 2021 votes.

The former Pradhan of a Panchayat in Nandigram met Abhishek on Tuesday and said that he had decided to return to the TMC as he was disillusioned with the BJP and its anti-people policies in West Bengal and beyond.

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.

“I will still win from Bhabanipur, because I work for people round-the-clock on 365 days of the year,” Mamata said on Tuesday.