BJP fields Suvendu Adhikari from Mamata Banerjee’s seat in West Bengal

Suvendu Adhikari has been fielded from Mamata's Bhawanipore seat as well as from his bastion of Nandigram where he defeated the chief minister in 2021.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday released its first list of 144 candidates for the West Bengal assembly polls, fielding leader of the Opposition in the assembly Suvendu Adhikari from Mamata Banerjee’s current seat of Bhawanipore in south Kolkata as well as from his traditional bastion of Nandigram where he defeated the chief minister in 2021.

File photo of West Bengal Assembly LoP Suvendu Adhikari. (ANI)

The list, released a day after two-phase polls were announced in the eastern state, also fielded former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta from Rashbehari in south Kolkata, former state unit chief Dilip Ghosh from his earlier seat of Kharagpur Sadar in West Midnapore district, and designer-turned-politician Agnimitra Paul from Asansol South.

In all, the party dropped two lawmakers from its tally. The list contained 11 women, 33 people from scheduled castes and13 people from scheduled tribes. The BJP may not contest all 294 seats in the eastern state and may leave a few to its allies in the Darjeeling hills, leaders said.

“I will win both seats and defeat Mamata Banerjee again,” Adhikari said after the announcement, projecting confidence that the BJP could challenge the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) even in its strongholds.

The development came a day after Adhikari told the media that Nandigram – where he defeated Banerjee by 1,956 votes five years ago – was the seat he would like to contest.

“Nandigram is where my heart is. I would always contest from Nandigram but the party makes its own decisions,” he said while BJP central leaders were preparing the list in Delhi in the presence of Union home minister Amit Shah.

Banerjee is seeking a fourth consecutive term after registering a landslide victory in 2021, riding on her party’s grassroots network, her personal appeal especially among women, and welfare handouts. The BJP is hoping for its first victory in the eastern state on the back of anti-incumbency, corruption allegations, and polarisation.

Among the Bengal BJP lawmakers fielded from their current seats included Shankar Ghosh (Siliguri), Dipak Burman (Falakata), Gouri Shankar Ghosh (Murshidabad), and Anup Saha (Dubrajpur).

Dilip Ghosh replaced BJP’s sitting lawmaker Hiranmay Chattopadhyay, a former Bengali movie actor. Ghosh won the seat in 2016 before being elected to the Lok Sabha after a three-year tenure as MLA. His tenure as MP ended in 2024. Former chief economic adviser, Ashok Lahiri, was not fielded from his Balurghat seat in north Bengal.

Both Bhawanipore and Nandigram hold enormous political importance in Bengal. The former, an urban seat close to Banerjee’s home in Kalighat, has been her preferred seat since she stormed to power in 2011. But in the 2024 general elections, the BJP managed to largely bridge the gap with the Trinamool Congress in the assembly segment, by leading in in four of the eight municipal wards that make up the seat. The BJP candidate, Debasree Chaudhuri, however, trailed TMC candidate Mala Roy by around 180,000 votes in the Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat, of which Bhawanipore is a part.

The rural seat of Nandigram was the seat of a violent agitation over land acquisition in 2007 and provided one of two jolts – the other being the protests in Singur over a proposed car factory – that ultimately led to the collapse of the then-formidable Left Front rule in 2011. In 2021, shortly after her then protege Adhikari switched to the BJP, Banerjee announced that she would shift from Bhawanipore to Nandigram.

She ultimately lost the election from Nandigram but her decision to take on Adhikari head on electrified her party’s campaign and contributed to the TMC posting a mammoth tally of 213 in the 294-member assembly.

Nandigram has been in the crosshairs of the TMC for months. After losing, Banerjee moved court alleging rigging by the BJP in Nandigram; senior TMC leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, who won from Bhawanipore, stepped down so that she could contest the bypoll from there to continue as chief minister.

TMC leaders said that on August 19, 2025, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee held a closed-door meeting with some East Midnapore leaders and instructed them to focus on Nandigram. I-PAC, the company TMC hired in 2019 to formulate poll strategies, was asked to launch an intensive survey at Nandigram.

Speculations had been rife on the Bhawanipore seat as well.

“Mamata Banerjee contested from Nandigram. I defeated her there. Let her contest from Bhawanipore. We will field a BJP candidate who will defeat her here as well. I give my word,” Adhikari said on September 4, 2025.

After the BJP announced Adhikari’s name on Monday, Samik Bhattacharya, the party’s state president, said, “Adhikari expressed his willingness to contest from Bhawanipore.”

TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh dismissed Adhikari’s claims. “Adhikari will be routed from both Bhawanipore and Nandigram. He is contesting against the chief minister only to steal some limelight before becoming politically irrelevant forever,” he said.

West Bengal, which went to the polls in eight phases at the height of the second wave of Covid five years ago, will see two-phase polls on April 23 and 29. This is the fewest phases in the crucial eastern state since 2001. The results will be out on May 4.

In a state where poll campaigns and even post-poll events are often violent, the Election Commission of India moved from seven and eight-phase polls in 2016 and 2021, respectively, to just two phases; 152 assembly constituencies across the north, central and western parts of the state will go to the polls on April 23 and 142 seats in the heart of south Bengal, the citadel of the TMC, will vote on April 29. In 2006 and 2011, Bengal went to the polls in five and six phases respectively.

The elections will also happen against the backdrop of the controversial special intensive revision that has already excised 6.18 million names and flagged another six million people under a controversial “logical discrepancy” category; their applications are currently being adjudicated by a group of 500 judicial officers. Their fate remains uncertain – ECI’s presentation on Sunday appeared to delete the whole group from its estimation of the total voters in Bengal – though the Supreme Court has asked ECI to publish supplementary voter lists.