By-election in Mamata’s Stronghold Bhabanipur Seat Fuels Speculation on BJP Candidates

With the announcement of West Bengal by-polls on Saturday, all eyes are set on the prestigious Bhawanipur constituency which Trinamool Congress Supremo Mamata Banerjee intends to contest to retain her Chief Minister’s post.

However, more interestingly, the star-studded fight tracked by political strategists has led experts to raise a major question: who will be the BJP’s candidates against Mamata Banerjee from Bhawanipur?

Many names of BJP leaders are doing the rounds. Still, some strong contenders are former TMC MP Dinesh Trivedi, Rudranil Ghosh (who contested from the same seat and was defeated by TMC’s Sovandeb Chattopadhyay), Former Meghalaya and Tripura governor and senior Bengal BJP leader Tathagata Roy, Bolpur assembly seat candidate Anirban Ganguly (defeated by TMC’s Chandra Nath Sinha), Swapan Dasgupta (lost to TMC’s Ramendu Sinharay from Tarakeswar constituency) and BJP vice president Pratap Banerjee.

Speaking to News18.com, State BJP President Dilip Ghosh said, “There are many leaders who are strong and efficient to contest from Bhawanipur and to name a few are Dinesh Trivedi, Rudranil Ghosh, Tathagata Roy, Pratap Banerjee etc. We will send their names and it is up to the Central leadership to decide who will be the candidate against Mamata Banerjee.”

Above all, most of the state BJP leaders feel that Dinesh Trivedi could be the ideal candidate against Mamata Banerjee as the assembly seat, consisting of 2,02,655 voters, is home to at least 50,000 voters inclined towards BJP and are largely belong to Gujarati, Sikh, Bihari, Marwari and other communities alongside Bengalis.

Tathagata Roy and Rudranil Ghosh are also the frontrunners to contest against the TMC chief. Two days ago, Ghosh had a meeting with the state BJP vice president, Dr Biswapriya Roy Chowdhury and general secretary Sayantan Basu regarding the by-polls, sources said.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Tathagata Roy was BJP’s Kolkata South candidate and stood second to TMC’s Subrata Bakshi, but he took the lead in the Bhawanipur Assembly segment by 184 seats.

In this year’s assembly polls, out of eight wards in Bhawanipur, BJP was leading in two wards and in the other two wards (63 and 72), BJP was trailing by a small margin. BJP was leading by 537 votes in Ward Number 74 and by 2,092 votes in Ward Number 70. In Ward Number 63, BJP was trailing by a small margin of 413 votes, while in Ward number 72, BJP was trailing by a small margin of 413 votes.

In a nutshell, Bhawanipur has some BJP support base, mainly Gujarati and Sikh, leading BJP leaders to consider fielding Dinesh Trivedi as the ideal face to represent the constituency.

After delimitation, Mamata Banerjee’s Kalighat residence falls under the Bhabanipur constituency, and it has been a stronghold of TMC since it came to power in West Bengal in 2011.

TMC General Secretary Subrata Bakshi won the seat in 2011 by nearly 50,000 votes defeating his nearest rival, Narayan Prasad Jain of CPI(M). The TMC had fought the election in alliance with Congress. Bakshi then vacated the seat to make way for Mamata Banerjee, an MP, to get elected to the state Assembly. She won the by-poll after defeating CPI(M) rival Nandini Mukherjee with a margin of nearly 54,000 votes.

Later, Bakshi contested the 2011 by-poll, held due to the resignation of Banerjee and her subsequent election to the State Assembly from Bhabanipur, and had won the election.

On May 21, to make way for the chief minister, TMC MLA Sovandeb Chattopadhyay resigned from the post.

As per the Indian Constitution, Mamata Banerjee – who lost her Nandigram seat in this Assembly Polls to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari – can run the state as a Chief Minister. But she will have to get elected in the next six months to retain her post.

“The Article 164(4) of our Constitution states that a Minister who for any period of six consecutive months is not a member of the Legislature of the State shall at the expiration of that period cease to be a Minister. This means Mamata Banerjee can become the Chief Minister of West Bengal. Still, as per the Constitution, she has to be elected within those six months to continue,” Political expert Kapil Thakur said. “If she is not elected at the end of six months, then she will lose her post.”

Since Sovandeb Chattopadhyay is an elected MLA, he must win a seat within six months to retain her MLA membership or get into the Assembly through ‘Vidhan Parishad’. The Upper House in the state Assembly led by Left parties abolished it in 1969 over ‘back door entry into the Assembly’ and the Parishad being a symbol of elitism.

On May 2, TMC leader Sovandeb Chattopadhyay recorded victory from the Bhawanipur seat after defeating BJP’s Rudranil Ghosh.

Banerjee personally decided on Chattopadhyay’s selection as she felt that he could retain the seat despite her decision to contest from Nandigram and not from her own constituency.

Unknown to many, Chattopadhyay was a boxer during his college days. He never missed a boxing championship, including International Boxing Federation (IBF), World Boxing Association (WBA), even today despite his busy schedule.