Bengal polls: Suvendu Adhikari clarifies on contesting from Nandigram, Bhabanipur

Kolkata, March 15 (IANS) The Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, on Sunday clarified about the possibilities of him being asked by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership to contest simultaneously from two Assembly constituencies in the upcoming elections in the state.

One of the two constituencies will surely be Nandigram in East Midnapore district, where Adhikari is a two-time legislator — first from 2016 to 2021 for the Trinamool Congress and then from 2021 to date for the BJP. The second constituency is Bhabanipur in South Kolkata, where the current elected legislator is the Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee.

When asked about this possibility in the afternoon, Adhikari neither denied nor confirmed it. “In the BJP, it is always a collective decision that matters. The candidate selection is also carried out accordingly. BJP might or may not even ask me to contest this time. Being a soldier of the BJP, I will accept the decision.”

However, he said that personally, he would prefer to contest from Nandigram this time as well. “Nandigram is my first choice. If the party leadership asks me to contest from any other seat also, I will definitely think about it,” he added while specifying any second Assembly constituency from where he would contest this time.

To recall, Adhikari got elected as a legislator from Nandigram for the second time in a row in 2021, defeating then Trinamool Congress candidate and the current Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee.

Later, she was elected from Bhabanipur in a by-election and retained her chair as the Chief Minister for the third consecutive term.

Political observers feel that this time, Bhabanipur might be a tougher bastion for the Chief Minister, considering that already 47,111 voters have been deleted from the constituency in the final voters’ list, which was published on February 28, and another 14,154 voters from that constituency are currently under judicial adjudication.

In such a situation, if Adhikari contests from Bhabanipur besides Nandigram, it will be an extremely tactical move of the BJP to limit the movement of Mamata Banerjee within that constituency during the campaign phase, leaving little room for her to move around the state for campaigning.

–IANS

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