KOLKATA: The BJP's announcement that Suvendu Adhikari, Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly and MLA from Nandigram, will take on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee from south Kolkata’s Bhabanipur in the upcoming assembly polls does not come as a huge surprise.
Suvendu was eager to fight against Mamata from Bhabanipur and had expressed his desire in this regard during several meetings with the party's central leadership in Delhi.
Besides Bhabanipur, Suvendu will also simultaneously contest from Nandigram where he had defeated Mamata by a narrow margin of hardly 2,000 votes in the last assembly polls in the state in 2021.
The BJP’s central leadership in Delhi on Monday released a list of candidates for 144 assembly constituencies in Bengal.
The move to field Suvendu from here could also force Mamata to spend more time in Bhabanipur and prevent her from moving out for election campaigns in other constituencies.
The outcome in Bhabanipur this time could be influenced by the deletion of about 48,000 absent, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) voters following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state. Apart from these, another 14,000 voters in the constituency have been branded as ‘under adjudication’ and awaiting clearance from judicial officers to retain their voting rights.
The BJP leadership in Bengal feels it may be difficult for Mamata to retain the Bhabanipur seat against the backdrop of the exclusion of such a huge number of voters besides those 14,000 whose fates are in limbo as per the Supreme Court order.
There are several other factors that seem advantageous for the saffron camp this time. For instance, the Trinamool Congress trailed behind the BJP in the number of votes in around three municipal wards in Bhabanipur as per the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
In the 2021 bypolls in Bhabanipur, Mamata had won against the BJP candidate Priyanka Tibrewal by a margin of more than 50,000 votes, which is around the same as the number of deleted voters following the SIR exercise. She was fielded by the party here after suffering a defeat against Suvendu in Nandigram.
Although Mamata had recently claimed that she will win again from Bhabanipur even if only one voter is left, she is gearing up for a tough fight.
The Trinamool Congress supremo held several meetings with her booth level agents and senior leaders to take stock of the situation well before the poll dates in Bengal were announced by the Election Commission on Sunday. The polls are scheduled in two phases on April 23 and 29 in the state.