Lok Sabha elections: Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, a vocal critic of Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, is trailing from the Baharampur constituency.
At 3pm, Chowdhury is behind ex-cricketer and Trinamool Congress leader Yusuf Pathan by 29,781 votes, ANI reports. Follow full coverage of the Lok Sabha elections.
Five-time MP and leader of opposition in the outgoing Lok Sabha, Chowdhury has been a strong and influential leader in Baharampur, having secured victory for the Congress party in three consecutive terms from 2009 to 2019. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, which has been in power in Bengal since 2011, has not yet won the seat.
In 2019, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, defeated TMC's Apurba Sarkar from the constituency with a margin of 80,696 votes. He was the lone Congress MP from Bengal in the 17th Lok Sabha.
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Chowdhury has also been a member of the West Bengal assembly from 1996 to 1999.
He was the chief of the West Bengal Congress and the minister of state for railways between 2012 and 2014 during the UPA government.
{{/usCountry}}He was the chief of the West Bengal Congress and the minister of state for railways between 2012 and 2014 during the UPA government.
{{/usCountry}}Polling in Chodhury's Baharampur Lok Sabha constituency was held on May 13 in Phase 4.
Though still a part of the Opposition bloc--INDIA, the TMC chose to go it alone in Bengal and announced candidates for all 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
The Congress and the Left Front have a seat-sharing arrangement in the state under which the Left parties contest 30 seats and the Congress contests the remaining 12 seats.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the TMC took the lion's share of the electoral spoils in the state, at 34, while the BJP had to be content with just 2 seats. The CPI(M) and the Congress won 2 and 4 seats, respectively.
However, in a poll stunner that few saw coming, the BJP turned the tables on the ruling TMC in the 2019 polls, winning 18 seats. The ruling party in the state saw its tally reduced to 22. The Congress fared a lowly third in the tally with just 2 seats while the Left Front was down to just a lone seat