Kolkata: Eight sitting MLAs including two ministers, one Rajya Sabha MP, and three MLAs who won on Bharatiya Janata Party tickets, have found their places in the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC’s) list of candidates for the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
New faces in the list include cricketer-turned-former BJP MP Kirti Azad in the constituency currently held by BJP veteran Surinder Singh Ahluwalia, former cricketer Yusuf Pathan against Congress’s Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, and actor-cum-reality show host Rachana Banerjee against the BJP’s sitting MP, former actor Locket Chatterjee.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the TMC won 22 seats, while the BJP won 18 and the Congress won two. Later, two MPs, the father and brother of rebel TMC leader Suvendu Adhikari who is now the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, allied with the BJP, though without formally joining the party.
However, BJP MP Arjun Singh, who was originally from the TMC, switched back to the TMC in 2022. The party also wrested Asansol Lok Sabha from the BJP in a 2021 bypoll after MP Babul Supriyo resigned and joined the TMC. This left the TMC effectively with 22 MPs and the BJP with 18.
The BJP has, as of now, named 20 candidates, of whom the Asansol nominee, Bhojpuri singer Pawan Singh, subsequently declined. The party has renominated nine incumbent MPs, including three junior Union ministers, and fielded three sitting MLAs. The Left parties and the Congress are yet to announce any candidates.
The TMC, among its sitting MPs, has dropped six. They are actors Nusrat Jahan (Basirhat) and Mimi Chakraborty (Jadavpur) and district-level leaders Sunil Mandal (Bardhaman Purba), Aparupa Poddar (Arambag) and C.M. Jatua (Mathurapur). Arjun Singh (Barrackpore), too, failed to find favour with the party despite coming back.
While octogenarian Jatua is not contesting due to his advanced age, the rest were dropped apparently because the party was not satisfied with their performance.
Consumer affairs minister Biplab Mitra has been fielded from Balurghat Lok Sabha constituency, where the BJP has renominated the incumbent MP, state unit president Sukanta Majumdar. Irrigation and waterways minister Partha Bhowmik has been fielded from Barrackpore, the seat that Arjun Singh wrested from the TMC contesting on a BJP ticket in 2019.
Among sitting MLAs, Bongaon MLA Biswajit Das, Raiganj MLA Krishna Kalyani and Ranaghat Dakshin MLA Mukut Mani Adhikari won on BJP tickets in 2021 but later joined the TMC. None of them has resigned to date, while Kalyani is also the TMC-backed chairman of the public accounts committee in the state assembly.
Das will be facing junior shipping minister Shantanu Thakur in Bongaon, while Kalyani has been fielded from former junior Union minister Debashree Chaudhuri’s Raiganj Lok Sabha seat. The BJP is yet to name its candidate. Adhikari, a leader of the Matua-Namashudra community, has been pitted against the BJP’s Jagannath Sarkar, who is also the incumbent in the Matua-dominated Ranaghat Lok Sabha.
These MLAs will now have to resign – as they are contesting on a different party’s ticket.
Among sitting TMC MLAs, Sitai MLA Jagadish Chandra Basunia has been fielded against junior home minister Nishith Paramanik in Cooch Behar, and actor-turned-Medinipur MLA June Malia has been fielded from Medinipur, which BJP’s former state unit president Dilip Ghosh won in 2019.
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Patashpur MLA Uttam Barik, who is also the sabhadhipati (chairperson) of East Midnapore zilla parishad (district council), has been fielded against the leader of the opposition Suvendu Adhikari’s brother, Soumyendu, from Kanthi.
Basirhat MLA Haji Nurul Islam, who was earlier the party’s Basirhat MP, has been fielded again from Basirhat Lok Sabha. Balarampur MLA and former state minister Shantiram Mahato has been fielded against the BJP’s Purulia incumbent Jagannath Singh Mahato, Taldangra MLA and TMC Bankura district unit president has been fielded against Union minister Sarkar in Bankura Lok Sabha, and Dhupguri MLA Nirmal Chandra Roy from BJP-held Jalpaiguri.
Rajya Sabha member Prakash Chik Baraik is contesting from the tribal-dominated Alipurduar, the constituency of outgoing junior Union minister John Barla, where the BJP has now fielded two-time MLA Manoj Tigga. Baraik was elected to the Rajya Sabha only in August last year.
Among the TMC’s new faces, a prominent one is youth leader and spokesperson Debangshu Bhattacharya from Tamluk, where the incumbent MP is BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari’s brother, Dibyendu. Most BJP leaders in West Bengal expect former Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who recently joined the BJP, to be fielded from Tamluk.
Among veteran MPs who have won three or more times, Sougata Roy, Sudeep Bandyopadhyay, Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and Shatabdi Roy have been renominated from Dumdum, Kolkata North, Shreerampore, Barasat and Birbhum, respectively. The party chief’s nephew and the TMC’s all-India general secretary and two-time Diamond Harbour MP Abhishek Banerjee will be contesting from his home turf.
The party has expectedly renominated Mahua Moitra, the outspoken Krishnanagar MP and staunch BJP critic, who was expelled from the Lok Sabha in December last year in a controversial chain of events. Mamata Banerjee had earlier made it clear that she was standing by Moitra.
The party has also renominated two-time MPs, former footballer Prasun Banerjee and actor Dipak Adhikary AKA Dev, and Pratima Mandal, and one-time MPs Asit Mal, Sajda Ahmed, Khalilur Rahman and Abu Taher Khan.
Deciphering the message
Speaking to The Wire on condition of anonymity, some TMC leaders described the list as “a perfect example of striking a balance between all interests”, while some others said it reflected the party’s “lack of confidence and strategy confusion.”
Rather strangely, there is a notable drop in the number of women candidates. From 17 candidates in 2019, it has come down to 12 this time. This is despite the party, over the past five years, repeatedly taking pride in giving 40% of nominations to women in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The party also focuses on women as one of its core support bases.
Even though the party is looking to improve its tally by consolidating Muslim votes in its favour, the number of Muslim candidates has also dropped from seven in 2019 to six this time. More than one-fourth of the state’s population is Muslim, according to the census of 2011.
In addition, fielding three candidates who are from outside the state – sitting Asansol MP former actor Shatrughan Sinha, Kirti Azad from Bardhaman-Durgapur and Yousuf Pathan from Baharampur – has left many TMC leaders and workers confused.
From the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, West Bengal’s ruling party, chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), has repeatedly branded the BJP as an “outsider” force, which culminated in their 2021 assembly election campaign theme Bangla Nijer Meyeke Chay (Bengal wants it own daughter).
Sinha and Azad hail from Bihar and were former BJP MPs from there, while Pathan is from PM Modi’s home state of Gujarat. The TMC, though, highlighted Pathan’s Bengal connection as one who played for Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the IPL cricket league.
Following these announcements, several district-level TMC leaders whom The Wire spoke to said they were apprehensive it could blunt the party’s Bengali ethnic identity plank.
According to Maidul Islam, a political scientist at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), the TMC chose to play safe by nominating tested politicians with a history of electoral success and reducing celebrity dependence, but two celebrity candidates from outside the state may blunt the party’s “outsider versus daughter of the soil” campaign.
“I can understand re-nominating Sinha. He is already the sitting MP and Asansol has a significant Hindi-speaking population. Bardhaman-Durgapur also has some Hindi speaking population but the candidature of Azad and Pathan would contradict the party’s appeal towards Bengali ethnic sentiments and anti-outsider pitch,” Islam said.
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Soon after the names were announced, Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury took potshots at the TMC for “importing candidates”, asking why the TMC could not find suitable candidates in West Bengal. BJP state unit president Sukanta Majumdar asked whether Sinha, Azad and Pathan would be called “outsiders” in Bengal or not.
However, political analyst Udayan Bandyopadhyay, an associate professor at Bangabasi College in Kolkata, considers the TMC’s list to be “more reflective of inclusive politics”.
“I think the inclusive pitch is better than the anti-outsider pitch, which is more of an exclusionary nature. Sinha, Azad and Pathan’s candidature also reflects the party’s desire to have prominent faces addressing the audience outside West Bengal, on issues of national significance,” Bandyopadhyay said.
Bandyopadhyay agrees that fielding so many sitting MLAs also reflected the party’s fear and lack of confidence. “The Jalpaiguri candidate, Nirmal Chandra Roy, had only just won the Dhupduri assembly by-election. He has a good image but he could also be a leading face in the campaign while the party fielded someone else to contest the Lok Sabha. The candidature is reflective of how limited the party’s options were,” he said.
Among other fresh candidates are TMC youth wing’s state unit president Sayoni Ghosh from Jadavpur, Sundarban district youth wing president Bapi Haldar from Mathurapur, Hooghly Zilla Parishad member Malati Bag from Arambagh, Santali literature and Padmashree and Banga Bibhushan awardee Kalipada Soren from Jhargram, psychiatrist Sharmila Sarkar from Bardhaman Purba and ex IPS Prasun Bandyopadhyay from Malda Uttar.
In Bishnupur, against incumbent BJP MP Soumitra Khan, the TMC has fielded his estranged wife, Sujata, who joined the TMC in 2020. In Malda Dakshin, the party has fielded Shahnawaz Ali Raihan, a doctoral student at Oxford University who was earlier a national-level leader of the Students’ Islamic Organisation of India (SIO), the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind.
