Political temperature soars in Bhabanipur as it gets ready for high voltage Mamata-Suvendu showdown

New Delhi: In West Bengal, the April-end state election is more than a political contest at the hustings; it is now a fierce struggle for identity and dominance between the Chief Minister and her former aide, currently the Leader of Opposition in State Assembly.

It is battleground Bhabanipur Assembly seat.

Politics turned personal in 2021, when Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee chose to challenge her long-time lieutenant Suvendu Adhikari at the latter’s bastion of Nandigram in Purba Medinipur district.

The contest — that many Trinamool Congress supporters dubbed would “teach Suvendu a lesson” for deserting them — did not augur well for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Mamata Banerjee lost by nearly 2,000 votes, though the Trinamool Congress swept the 2021 Assembly polls, winning 215 of the state’s 294 seats.

An astute politician like Mamata Banerjee counted on her own role in mentoring him but not the fact that it was Suvendu Adhikari who had coordinated, and built up the Nandigram resistance of 2007.

The movement featured prominently among factors that led to the Left Front’s ouster in 2011.

The Adhikari family has a long political history in the district of Purba Medinipur, where his father Sisir Adhikari represented the Kanthi Lok Sabha constituency three times in a row (2009, 2014, and 2019) as a Trinamool Congress MP.

He stood aside in 2024 due to advancing age and health issues and the seat went to his son Soumendu, who won as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate.

Incidentally, four of the seven Assembly constituencies comprising the Parliamentary seat went to the BJP in the 2021 state poll.

Since Suvendu’s fallout, the family has subsequently cut its ties with the Trinamool Congress.

Meanwhile, Tamluk Lok Sabha seat, of which Nandigram is among its seven Assembly sections, was also won by BJP candidate Abhijit Gangopadhyay. For Mamata Banerjee, meanwhile, it was yet another by-election from her “Para (neighbourhood)”, Bhabanipur, that allowed her to reclaim her chair for the third successive term as the West Bengal Chief Minister.

And now, it is her former mentee Suvendu Adhikari, who has brought the fight into her (Mamata Banerjee’s) backyard.

However, Suvendu Adhikari has chosen to file his nomination from Nandigram as well. Thus keeping his options open for entering the state Assembly, Suvendu is exhibiting a confidence that has brought some discomfort in the Trinamool camp.

Top names from the Trinamool’s state leadership are camping and campaigning for their leader in Bhabanipur as she (Mamata Banerjee) takes an election tour of the state.

Suvendu draws faith from several aspects. One, he has iterated his claim that the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls will weed out a large chunk of Trinamool vote bank that he alleges are “non-existent” or comprises “illegal migrants”. He is also counting on the anti-incumbency factor, largely arising from law and order issues such as the rape and murder of a medical intern at the R.G. Kar Hospital, political violence, among others, and fraud and smuggling cases filed against Trinamool leaders by central probe agencies.

Additionally, an unprecedented number of administrative and police officers have been transferred by the state Chief Election office, who Suvendu Adhikari dubs as owing allegiance to Mamata Banerjee.

Even the Bhabanipur returning officer was replaced, facing criticism from the Trinamool Congress, alleging close ties with Suvendu Adhikari himself.

While the ruling party and the state’s principal Opposition exchange barbs against each other, Bhabanipur has turned into the ‘centre d’attention’ awaiting the clash of the two political titans.

For the records, Mamata Banerjee has lost only two elections in her long career, first representing the Congress, before breaking out in 1998 to form her own party.

She became MP from the Jadavpur constituency in 1984, beating CPI-M veteran Somnath Chatterjee. However, she lost to CPI-M’s Malini Bhattacharya subsequently in 1989.

Between 1991 and 2009, she won successively six times from Kolkata Dakshin Parliamentary seat.

Soon after her party, then in alliance with the Congress, trounced the Left Front, Mamata Banerjee quit the Parliament to contest a by-election from Bhabanipur in 2011.

She retained the seat in 2016, but decided to shift to Nandigram in the last Assembly poll in 2021.

IANS