Cong' Lone Face in Bengal, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury Proves Why He is Still The Nawab of His Fort

Kolkata: In the midst of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s surging popularity and powerful Trinamool Congress in Bengal, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury is the lone Congress candidate who managed to win Baharampur Lok Sabha seat in Murshidabad district against TMC’s Apurba Sarkar with more than 78,000 votes.

Popular as the ‘nawab of Murshidabad’ or ‘Robinhood of Baharampur', Chowdhury welcomed the people’s mandate and said, “I will look forward to serve my people with more dedication.”

In Bengal, this is the only seat where the Congress has emerged as a winner, or was even a factor.

In the rest of the 41 seats, it was the Trinamool Congress versus the BJP. While the saffron brigade is leading in 18 seats, the Mamata Banerjee-led party is ahead in 22 constituencies.

The Left Front has failed to open its account in the state that it ruled for 34 years till Banerjee came to power in 2011.

At a time when the Congress is struggling to withstand the ‘Modi-wave’ across the nation, Chowdhury’s lead in Baharampur came as a relief for the Bengal Congress Unit.

In the 2014 general election, he had defeated TMC’s celebrity singer-candidate Indranil Sen and polled more than 5,83,549 votes in his favour, while Sen secured about 2,26,982 votes.

The other candidates in the fray were RSP’s Pramothes Mukherjee, BJP’s Debes Adhikari and BSP’s Kushadhwaj Bala.

The Baharampore Lok Sabha constituency is traditionally a Congress stronghold seat since 1999. He is also a former president of Bengal state Congress unit.

Earlier, it was held by the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) from 1952 to 1984.

There are seven Assembly constituencies of this Lok Sabha seat — Naoda, Kandi, Beldanga, Burwan, Rejinagar, Baharampur and Bharatpur. All the seven seats were won by the Congress in the 2016 state election.

However, unlike Adhir, the other high-profile Congress candidate Abhijit Mukherjee, son of former President Pranab Mukherjee, lost from the Jangipur Lok Sabha seat.

So far, TMC’s Khalilur Rahaman is leading in the seat by a margin of over 3 lakh votes.