Putting all speculation to rest, the BJP today chose Suvendu Adhikari for the Chief Minister’s post in West Bengal, where it scored a thumping win in the recently held Assembly polls.
Adhikari was elected the leader of the BJP’s legislature party in a meeting chaired by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Kolkata this afternoon.
Fifty-five-year-old Adhikari served as the Leader of the Opposition in the now-dissolved Assembly. Once a trusted lieutenant of Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, Adhikari switched to the BJP in 2020, months ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls. In 2021, the BJP emerged as the main opposition in Bengal, winning 77 seats in the Assembly. Five years on, it has stormed to power after winning 207 seats in this election.
Adhikari is the son of three-time MP Sisir Adhikari, who served as Union Minister in the UPA-II government. He started his political journey with the Chhatra Parishad, the Congress’s students’ wing, at a time when the Left was at its peak in Bengal. He was was first elected a councillor in the Kanthi municipality in 1995. He switched to the Trinamool after Banerjee founded the party in 1998. Adhikari’s entry provided the TMC with the presence it required to challenge the CPI(M) machinery in Purba Medinipur district, where the Adhikari family had been involved in politics for decades. His organisational skills boosted the party’s strength in the region, as Trinamool took on then CPI(M) strongman and former MP Lakshman Seth.
When the Nandigram agitation began in March 2007, it was Suvendu who powered the TMC’s campaign against land acquisition by the then Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government. Apart from his organisational skills, which many in the TMC acknowledged when he left the party over a decade later, his straightforward speeches with a rural Bengali accent and streetfighter image — similar to Mamata Banerjee — helped him build a following.
A shrewd tactician, Suvendu used the Nandigram movement as a springboard for both the party and himself, consolidating power for himself and playing a key role in the party in Purba Medinipur and neighbouring districts. In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Adhikari was elected from Tamluk. He retained the seat in 2014 before vacating it after winning the Nandigram seat in the 2016 Assembly election. Mamata Banerjee gave him charge of the Transport Ministry. At one point, he Adhikari was considered the second-most powerful figure within the Trinamool Congress.
His drift away from Mamata and the TMC started when she started preparing her nephew Abhishek Banerjee as her second-in-command, a position Suvendu held by default till then. The transport minister in the second Mamata government, Adhikari left the party in a surprise move in 2020, later raising the slogan, “tolabaj bhaipo hatao [kick out the extortionist nephew]”. This slogan, raised at a public meeting in Paschim Medinipur district, led Mamata to label the Adhikari family “Mir Jafars (traitors)”. The TMC chief also berated herself by calling herself a “big donkey (boro gadha)” for having failed to recognise their “true face” sooner.
However, his loss was keenly felt as Mamata lost to him in Nandigram in the 2021 elections, and the TMC lost its strong grip on Purba Medinipur. Defeating Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram in the 2021 polls and repeating the feat in Bhabanipur in the 2026 assembly polls has consolidated his position within the BJP hierarchy. After the 2021 election, his tough stand on key issues despite the Trinamool’s huge majority in the House was appreciated by the BJP leadership.