Kolkata: After her own candidate backed out of the Nandigram bypoll, Mamata Banerjee said on Friday that her faction of the Trinamool Congress will now back the Congress nominee. She also noted she has the Congress’s support in the fight to claim the name and symbol of the party she founded in 1998: “Rahul Gandhi called me yesterday. We are together. We will not surrender to the BJP.”
Her faction had announced Sanchita Pradhan Dey as the candidate on Sunday; on Thursday night, Dey is learnt to have met Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, and on Friday it was revealed that Dey was withdrawing from the contest. The nominations have already ended for the October 6 contest, so there’s no time for a replacement.
“We had decided earlier; we have given our support to the Congress in Nandigram,” she announced at a press conference where she lambasted the state and Centre’s ruling BJP, Suvendu Adhikari, and the Election Commission of India.
Sanchita Dey’s candidature was announced after much speculation that Mamata Banerjee would herself contest the Nandigram bypoll to enter the assembly and fight the TMC factionalism head-on. There were also reports that she was open to an alliance with the Congress for the bypolls in Nandigram and Rejinagar. The Nandigram bypoll was necessitated by Adhikari’s vacating of one of the two seats he won, as he retained Bhabanipur, where he defeated Mamata Banerjee in the polls earlier this year.
Instead, Mamata chose Dey, a teacher who had lost her job following the cancellation of the appointments of 26,000 teachers in connection with the alleged recruitment scam. She was a rather low-profile pick for a seat that has been a major battleground where Mamata Banerjee lost to aide-turned-enemy Suvendu Adhikari in 2021. She had then entered the assembly via a bypoll in Bhabanipur, a seat she lost this time to Adhikari.
As Dey withdrew, Mamata faced another setback within a day of a major jolt as the Election Commission announced it was freezing the Trinamool name and symbol; thus, neither the Mamata Banerjee faction nor Ritabrata Banerjee’s group could use them for the bypolls.
Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has criticised the EC decision, alleging a plot by the BJP to break parties. Congress’s central unit leaders said on X that the party is with Mamata Banerjee against such plots.
As for Bengal, where the Congress has long been associated with the Left and not the TMC, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury took a dig at Mamata Banerjee. “Didi’s candidate for Nandigram ran away. Now, we await the fate of the candidate from Rejinagar; perhaps he, too, will flee, for they belong to a party of deserters,” he said.
He appealed to those who wish to vote against the BJP, “There stands a great banyan tree, the Congress party itself, so voting for the leaves that have fallen from this banyan tree amounts to an insult to the tree,” referring to the fact that Mamata Banerjee formed the TMC in 1998 after leaving the Congress.
“Where the Indian National Congress stands tall, do not look at any other ‘Congress’ faction; instead, extend your direct support to the Congress. Under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress is witnessing a resurgence in India, a revival that has the entire BJP worried today,” Chowdhury said.
