Suvendu Adhikari was Nandigram’s Trinamool MLA before joining the BJP.
New Delhi:
The Bengal blockbuster battle has been declared. It will be Mamata Banerjee against her former Lieutenant Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram. On Saturday, the BJP announced the names of 57 seats in the Bengal polls that will begin later this month and Suvendu Adhikari is the BJP’s choice to face Mamata Banerjee.
The 50-year-old former Minister of Transport and Environment had resigned in December and joined the BJP in the presence of Amit Shah. It was Nandigram’s Trinamool MLA from 2016 and is widely viewed as BJP’s most important acquisition before the polls.
Mamata Banerjee on Friday rolled up her sleeves for battle declaring that she would fight from only one seat and that would be Nandigram. She had previously said that she could compete from her old seat at Bhowanipore as well, but yesterday she cleared the air, handing over the Bhowanipore seat in Kolkata to her power minister, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay.
Just before that, Suvendu Adhikari’s father, Sisir Adhikari, who is a Trinamool MP and has avoided commenting on the rift between his son and Mamata Banerjee, said yesterday that his decision to face his son would be a boomerang for her.
The Adhikari family, headed by Sisir Adhikari and made up of sons Suvendu, Dibyendu and Soumendu, has absolute dominion over the Purba Midnapore district.
Sisir Adhikari is deputy of Trinamool of Kanthi, his son Dibyendu is deputy of Trinamool of Tamluk in the district. Soumendu was President of Kanthi Township until his recent removal and Suvendu was Nandigram’s MLA. The district has a substantial Muslim population.
Adhikari was virtually the architect of the expulsion of the Nandigram left in 2007 after a bloody battle for farmers’ rights in the area where the CPM government wanted to establish a chemical center. Trinamool’s sweep of Nandigram in 2007 is one of the key factors that catapulted Mamata Banerjee to power in 2011.
The BJP announcement made Nandigram undeniably the most important contest of this election ever organized in Nandigram, with the two-time chief minister taking the fight directly to the BJP and, symbolically, all those who left it for the BJP.
This week, Suvendu Adhikari had told the BJP leadership that he was confident of defeating Mamata Banerjee by “at least 50,000 votes” in Nandigram. But the final decision to place it against the top face of Trinamool was left to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to sources.
Responding to his announcement on Friday, Adhikari changed the “outsider” label used by Mamata Banerjee against the BJP and described himself as a “son” of Midnapore, the region in which Nandigram belongs.
The Left-Congress-ISF combination has not yet decided which party will fight in Nandigram. The ISF had said that they would like to send a family member of their leader Pirzada Abbas Siddiqui from Nandigram.
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