E-Paper
Stage is set for a fierce battle in TMC bastion
Nandigram assembly constituency in Bengal’s East Midnapore has hit the headlines with Mamata Banerjee announcing her decision to contest from it,
Nandigram, roughly 132 km to the south-west of Kolkata, is a small town. According to the 2011 census, it had 5,803 people and 25 street lights.
It was also key to the march to power of Mamata Banerjee and her All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). A three-year violence-resistance movement against the then Left Front government’s futile bid to acquire farmland for a chemical hub helped her come to power. The movement had begun in March 2007 when 14 farmers were gunned down by the state police.
Now, the Nandigram assembly constituency in Bengal’s East Midnapore has hit the headlines with Banerjee announcing her decision to contest from it, following up on a comment she made during a meeting at Nandigram’s Tekhali area. The constituency, which surrounds the town, has about 195,000 voters.
Her rival is her one-time protege Suvendu Adhikari, who was at the forefront of the land movement against the Left Front, and who defected to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in December.
That comment may have been bait for Adhikari, senior BJP leaders admit in private.
Adhikari, whose father and elder brother still hold two Lok Sabha seats for the AITC in East Midnapore, is a son of the soil.
Soon after Mamata made her comment in January, a senior BJP leader recalls, “Suvendu, and many of us, reacted by saying Banerjee should contest from Nandigram only and not from Bhawanipore in south Kolkata from where she has has won twice” . Banerjee seems to have accepted this challenge. ”She has made things tough for Suvendu,” added this BJP leader who asked not to be named.
“The chief minister’s fears were exposed… She became a candidate from Nandigram because she knows she will be defeated in Bhawanipore. Fearing that she might lose from Nandigram as well, she said she may contest from Tollygunge,” Adhikari tweeted on Saturday, referring to a joke Banerjee cracked at minister Aroop Biswas, the incumbent from Tollygunge in south Kolkata, while announcing his name.
Amit Malviya, head of the party’s IT cell, tweeted, “Mamata Banerjee, by relinquishing her traditional seat of Bhawanipore, has already conceded defeat, even before the first vote has been cast. Bring it on.”
The changing narrative did not go unnoticed. Yashwant Sinha, the former BJP leader and Union finance minister, and an avowed critic of the Narendra Modi government tweeted, “First they challenged Mamata to contest from Nandigram. Then they said that if she contests from two seats it will show lack of confidence. She has decided to contest only from Nandigram. Now they are saying she has run away from Bhawanipore. You can’t win them all, can you?”
Experts say Banerjee’s decision to contest from Nandigram may be part of a bigger strategy for south Bengal which will decide the outcome of the coming elections. Though the BJP set a record in 2019 by winning seven of the eight Lok Sabha seats in the north Bengal region, the number of assembly segments in these eight seats is only 56, out of the state’s 294. And in 2019, in these 56, the BJP was ahead in 34. In the rest of the state, which accounts for 238 assembly seats, the BJP was ahead in only 87 in 2019. South Bengal alone accounts for 167, of which the BJP was ahead in only 48 constituencies in 2019. The AITC was ahead in 119.
Election strategist Prashant Kishor, drafted by Banerjee after her party’s debacle in 2019, said his comment that the BJP will not win more than 99 seats in the entire state is based on the ground reality in south Bengal.
“The extensive work done by the government during the recent Duware Sarkar (government at the doorstep) programme has had a huge effect on people. These are more effective than political rhetoric from the opposition,” Kishor said.
Election analyst and Kolkata-based political science professor Udayan Bandopadhyay says Banerjee may have penned in Adhikari. “Winning the Nandigram seat will be tough for Adhikari. He will be forced to spend most of his time in Nandigram and will not be able to work for the BJP in the other districts of south Bengal where his presence is needed,” he said.
To be sure, elections in 26 of the 167 constituencies in South Bengal will be held after April 1, when Nandigram goes to the polls. At Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Sunday rally in Kolkata, which was his first in the city in this election season, Nandigram, not surprisingly, surfaced.
