West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee will contest the by-polls from the Bhowanipore Assembly constituency. Sitting MLA Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay resigned from the seat on Friday.
Chattopadhyay formally submitted his resignation to West Bengal Legislative Assembly Speaker Biman Bandyopadhyay in his Assembly chamber in the presence of state minister Partha Chatterjee and other Trinamool Congress leaders.
After submitting his resignation, he said, “The chief minister has to get elected as a legislator within six months. I had contested this year’s election from Mamata Banerjee’s constituency. Today, I am resigning from this seat so that she gets elected from Bhowanipore,”
Banerjee lost the 2021 Assembly elections to Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram. Banerjee now needs to get re-elected to the Assembly within six months to hold on to the chief minister’s chair.
During the declaration of the Assembly election results, it had been reported initially that Banerjee won by a margin of 1,200 votes. But later the officer announced Adhikari as the winner by 1,956 votes. Banerjee had then vowed to move the court over the Nandigram result.
Bhowanipore was represented twice by sitting chief minister Mamata Banerjee. She won from the constituency in 2011 and 2016. However, in this year’s election, Banerjee moved to Nandigram to take on former aide-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikari, now a BJP leader.
Earlier, in January, Mamata Banerjee had announced that she was moving to Nandigram but would field someone trusted to take care of the people of Bhowanipore. She had said that Nandigram was close to her heart and that she can ‘forget her name but not Nandigram’. Considering the attachment she had with the people of Nandigram, she had wanted to contest from there, she had said.
Following her announcement of leaving Bhowanipore, the BJP had claimed that Mamata was scared that she would be defeated and that was why she had left the seat. During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Banerjee was behind in her ward and the margin was just over 3,000 votes.
Located in south Kolkata, Bhowanipore was a Congress bastion during Mamata Banerjee’s time in the Congress and then became a TMC safe seat.
In the 2011 by-polls, Banerjee had defeated CPI-M’s Nandini Mukherjee in Bhowanipore. She had won 77.46 percent of the votes while her competitor secured just 20.43 percent. In the next election held in 2016, Banerjee again emerged victorious but her vote percentage came down by 30 percent in a significant fall. She got 65,520 votes with a 47.67 percent vote share while the Congress’ Deepa Das Munshi got 40,219 votes with a 29.26 percent vote share.
It is to be noted that Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay has resigned from the Assembly, but not from his ministerial post. Currently, he is the minister for agriculture.
However, questions are also being raised about his political future and which seat he would contest from. Khardah TMC MLA Kajol Singha died due to Covid-19, but the seat might see Finance Minister Amit Mitra contesting for it. The other options are the seats from where BJP MPs Jagonath Sarkar and Nisith Pramanik have resigned after winning.