West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari on Wednesday took his oath as the legislator for Kolkata’s Bhabanipur, announcing that Nandigram—the East Midnapore seat he has held since 2016—will now head to a by-election.
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“I had to follow my party’s decision. Someone else will be elected from Nandigram, but I promise that over the next five years, I will not let the people there feel even once that I am not their MLA. All promises made during the campaign will be kept,” Adhikari said.
The chief minister, who is scheduled to visit Bhabanipur on Wednesday evening, recently toured Nandigram three times to thank voters following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) decisive victory, where they secured 207 of Bengal’s 294 seats against the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) 80.
Adhikari defeated TMC chairperson and former chief minister Mamata Banerjee in the April 29 elections by a margin of over 15,000 votes. This follows the 2021 polls where Adhikari also defeated Banerjee in Nandigram by approximately 2,000 votes, a loss that forced her to contest a by-poll in Bhabanipur to retain her chief ministership at the time.
Adhikari first won the Nandigram seat in 2016 while serving as a TMC Lok Sabha member for Tamluk. After resigning from Parliament to join the state cabinet, he eventually broke ties with the TMC in December 2020 to join the BJP.
In a separate development, Humayun Kabir—the former TMC legislator for Bharatpur who was suspended in December for laying the foundation stone of a mosque modeled after the Babri Masjid—secured victories in both the Nowda and Rejinagar seats under his newly-formed Aam Janata Unnayan Party.
“I will represent Nowda. The Election Commission will decide the date for the Rejinagar bypoll,” Kabir said.
