KOLKATA: Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Monday announced six candidates for the forthcoming Rajya Sabha election for six seats from West Bengal.
Of the six candidates, three are new — Saket Gokhale, TMC national spokesperson, Prakash Chik, Alipurduar district president and Samirul Islam, president of Bangla Sanskritik Mancha, a civil society organization. Three others are sitting MP Derek O’Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Dola Sen.
The “strategic” move to field these candidates is said to be aimed at retaining the party’s minority vote bank and wooing the electorate of north Bengal where the BJP had made deep inroads in the recent election. The induction of three new faces is said to be significant as aims at two goals.
“One goal is assuring the minority electorates who have been showing their political allegiance in favour of our party since the change of guard in Bengal in 2011. Our party received a jolt in the Sagardighi by-election in Murshidabad as we lost the Assembly seat, where minorities form 66 per cent of the total electorates, to the candidate of the Left Front—Congress alliance. It was the first time since 2011, the minority voters turned away their faces from our party which we consider a serious issue as the particular community has an electoral stake of more than 30 per cent in Bengal. Samirul’s nomination as a Rajya Sabha candidate was a move to woo electorates of his community,” said a senior TMC leader.
Samirul’s cultural outfit enjoys massive support among rural Bengal communities, especially the minorities in Murshidabad, Birbhum, Malda, Hooghly, East and West Burdwan districts.
Elaborating on the second goal, he said the party is focusing on north Bengal to woo the electorates of the region before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
“The BJP made an aggressive onslaught in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections by bagging seven seats out of eight in north Bengal and we failed to win a single seat as the Congress won Malda (south) Lok Sabha constituency. In the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP performed better than us in the region. Chik’s nomination was a move aiming at BJP’s north Bengal turf,” he explained.