Bhabanipur Constituency At Stake In Bengal Bypolls: Trinamool Congress Has Deployed Its Top Leaders

The Trinamool Congress has deployed its top leaders to oversee the bypolls in south Kolkata’s Bhabanipur from where Mamata Banerjee is expected to gain legitimacy as chief minister. Banerjee had lost to close aide-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikari of the BJP in Nandigram, but took over as chief minister. She needs to get elected to the Assembly within six months (by November 4) if she is to retain her chair. Trinamool’s trade union leader and power minister Sovandeb Chattopadhyay contested and won from Bhabanipur, the seat that Mamata Banerjee had won in 2016 as well as the bypolls in 2011, in the recent Assembly polls. Chattopadhyay had defeated BJP’s Rudranil Ghosh by over 28,000 votes in the 2021 Assembly polls. But he resigned soon after his victory to facilitate his party chief’s entry to the Assembly. Given Chattopadhyay’s convincing win from Bhabanipur just a few months ago (he bagged 57.7 per cent of the votes cast), and the Trinamool’s thumping statewide victory, the bypolls should be smooth sailing for the Trinamool chief. But the deployment of top Trinamool leaders—transport minister Firhad Hakim, panchayat & rural development minister Subrata Mukherjee, industry minister Partha Chatterjee, senior leader Debashish Kumar (who is the MLA from the neighbouring Rashbehari constituency) and Mamata Banerjee’s own brother Kartick Bandopadhyay—to micromanage the poll campaign reveals signs of nervousness within the Trinamool leadership. #WestBengal #MamataBanerjee #TrinamoolCongress Subscribe to Swarajya on YouTube. Get a Swarajya subscription: https://subscriptions.swarajyamag.com... Website: https://swarajyamag.com/ Twitter:   / swarajyamag   Facebook:   / swarajyamag