‘Nandigram is my responsibility’: Abhishek Banerjee rallies TMC cadre in Suvendu bastion
Telegraph | 25 March 2026
At the close of counting in the Bengal Assembly polls on May 2 five years ago, Suvendu Adhikari had edged past Mamata Banerjee by 1,956 votes.
The defeat has continued to rankle the Trinamool supremo and the party’s rank and file over the past five years.
In the first week of campaigning ahead of next month’s elections, Trinamool’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee’s message to the party workers was to recover the booths where the party fared poorly in the Assembly and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
“We need to work in the booths where we did not do well in 2021 and 2024. The 2021 Assembly election result case is still pending in court. We have fielded someone who stays in the area, unlike Suvendu,” Abhishek told the party workers at Nandigram.
Abhishek told the party workers: “Nandigram is my responsibility. All of you take responsibility for the coming 25 days. For the next five years I will be responsible for Nandigram.”
In 2021, Suvendu had received 1, 10,764 votes against Mamata’s 1, 08,808 votes in a constituency that had over 68,000 Muslims comprising just over 26 per cent of the electorate.
From the 2.57 lakh voters in 2021, the electorate after the release of the final draft rolls stands at 2, 68,378. Around 10,616 were marked under adjudication after the final rolls were published on February 28.
It is still not clear how many of the 10,616 voters made it to the supplementary list, which was published close to midnight on March 23.
Suvendu and his father the veteran Sisir have been the keepers of a large swathe of undivided Midnapore and later East Midnapore, first with the Congress and later Trinamool, while the CPM lorded over the rest of the district.
Switching to the BJP months before the 2021 Assembly polls, and defeating Mamata, her second poll defeat in 42 years of electoral politics, Suvendu is now the most prominent face of the BJP.
Just as Mamata took the battle to Nandigram against her former protégé, this time Suvendu is pitted against the incumbent chief minister from Bhabanipur and is defending the Nandigram seat against a Hindu-hardliner and Suvendu-loyalist who joined Trinamool eight days ago.
In Hindu-majority areas of Nandigram, the BJP’s campaign appeared polarised. Sections of Hindu Left voters, some of whom alleged they were unable to vote when Suvendu represented the seat for the Trinamool, backed him as the BJP nominee.