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Bengal elections: BJP fields actor Hiranmoy Chatterjee from Kharagpur Sadar
The seat is significant as in the 2016 assembly elections, Ghosh managed to wrest it from Congress’s Gyan Singh Sohanpal who had represented Kharagpur Sadar uninterrupted since 1982. Ghosh went on to contest Lok Sabha elections in 2019, vacating the seat. Bypolls saw TMC win it
The Bharatiya Janata Party has fielded Tollywood actor Hiranmoy Chatterjee from Kharagpur Sadar for the coming West Bengal assembly elections, the party announced on Wednesday, ending speculations whether party’s state chief Dilip Ghosh would contest from here.
The assembly seat was left vacant when BJP announced the names of 57 candidates for the 60 seats that go into polls in the first and second phase on March 27 and April 1 respectively, further fuelling the speculations.
In the 2016 assembly elections, Ghosh had managed to wrest Kharagpur Sadar seat from Congress’s Gyan Singh Sohanpal who had represented it uninterrupted since 1982. Ghosh went on to contest Lok Sabha elections in 2019, vacating the seat. Bypolls saw TMC win it and the party has fielded Pradip Sarkar, the sitting MLA.
“The party has named Hiranmoy Chatterjee from Kharagpur Sadar and Supriti Chatterjee from Barjora. These two seats were left vacant when the candidate list was announced on Saturday,” said a senior BJP leader.
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Hiranmoy Chatterjee, who was earlier with the TMC’s youth wing, joined the BJP in February in the presence of home minister Amit Shah, BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and state unit chief Ghosh in Namkahana.
“We genuinely wanted Dilip Ghosh to contest from Kharagur Sadar so that he could be defeated. TMC won the seat in the by-election by around 20,000 votes. But it seems that Ghosh is afraid even before the game could begin. All the three faces of BJP in the state – Ghosh, Suvendu Adhikari and Rahil Sinha – would lose this time,” said Debangshu Bhattacharya, a TMC spokesperson.
Adhikari has been pitted against West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram.
The eight-phase elections for 294 seats of the West Bengal assembly are scheduled to be held between March 27 and April 29. Counting of votes will be held on May 2.
