Turncoats and seasoned leaders on BJP Bengal list

KOLKATA: The BJP’s first list of 28 candidates from Bengal, released on Thursday, was on expected lines with seasoned leaders and turncoats grabbing nominations for key Lok Sabha seats.


At least one nomination, that of former Trinamool Yuva leader Nisith Pramanik from Cooch Behar, caused much heartburn among party cadres, who laid siege to the district party office in the evening but were warned by state president Dilip Ghosh that there would be “no change in the list prepared by the central leadership”.

The names for the 14 remaining seats are likely to be released on Monday. As of now, BJP has fielded only four women and its final percentage of women candidates from Bengal will fall far short of the 41% achieved by Trinamool.

Almost all senior state party functionaries figure on the BJP list with Ghosh being fielded from Midnapore and national secretary Rahul Sinha from Kolkata Uttar. Union minister Babul Supriyo is the party’s nominee from Asansol for the second time. Netaji’s grandnephew, Chandra Bose, has again been fielded from Kolkata Dakshin, where he had lost in 2014.

The other prestigious seat in the metropolis, Jadavpur, has gone to expelled Trinamool MP and Visva Bharati professor Anupam Hazra; he will take on Trinamool’s Mimi Chakraborty and CPM’s Bikash Bhattacharya here.

Another defector, Trinamool’s erstwhile Barrackpore strongman Arjun Singh, will take on sitting MP Dinesh Trivedi from Barrackpore.

The most high-profile new face on BJP’s list is former West Midnapore SP Bharati Ghosh. She has been pitted against Trinamool’s sitting MP Dev from Ghatal and will be expected to use her experience in the police service to checkmate the ruling party’s vote machine in the area.

The BJP central election committee has shuffled constituencies of some state functionaries. Former BJP MLA from Basirhat, Samik Bhattacharya, has been shifted to Dum Dum while party state general secretary Sayantan Basu has been fielded from Basirhat. State BJP Mahila Morcha leader Locket Chatterjee , who was expected to get the Birbhum seat, will contest from Hooghly; the party brass has picked old hand Dudh Kumar Mondal to take on Anubrata Mondal’s might in Birbhum.

Besides Hazra, Singh and Pramanik, the fourth defector from Trinamool to be gifted a nomination is outgoing Bishnupur MP Soumitra Khan. He will defend his seat, this time as a BJP candidate.

Former CPM MLA from Habibpur, Khagen Murmu, who joined BJP a few days ago, has been given the ticket from Malda Uttar. Local BJP leaders had put up posters against him to alert the high command as the party will have to take on Trinamool’s Mausam Noor in this seat.

The most interesting BJP decision is to field Nisith Pramanik from Cooch Behar. A former aide of Abhishek Banerjee, he ran a parallel organisation in Dinhata block. The then Trinamool Yuva leader from Bhetaguri had led the party’s youth wing to establish command on Dinhata panchayat samiti in the rural polls. However, he was shown the door on Abhishek’s directive days after CBI started a probe against him following a complaint that he was involved in human trafficking.