Suvendu Adhikari, the former close aide of West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) Chief Mamata Banerjee, defeated his mentor in the closely watched battle for Nandigram in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections.
Adhikari switched to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in December 2020, after ending a two-decade relationship with TMC. Addressing an election rally ahead of the Assembly polls, Adhikari had said that he would "defeat her or quit politics".
"If I am fielded by my party from Nandigram, I will defeat her by a margin of at least 50,000 votes or I will quit politics," he had said. The electoral battle was being considered a matter of prestige for Banerjee and a tryst with history for Suvendu.
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Nandigram assumes significance for Banerjee as it was her road to chief ministership in 2011. It was one of the places of TMC's anti-land acquisition protest, while the other being Singur. Around 14 villagers were killed in police firing in 2007 when they were protesting against land acquisition for a chemical hub of Indonesian firm Salim Group.
Banerjee, then the opposition TMC leader, had spearheaded a movement against the Left Front government's acquisition of arable land in Nandigram and Singur for industrialisation.
Her party reaped rich dividends from the agitations, winning 50 percent of the panchayat seats in 2008, bagging 19 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 and ending the 34-year-long Left Front rule in the state in 2011.
Over the last few months, the TMC supremo and Suvendu have been involved in a bitter war of words, taking swipes at each other over the 2007 Nandigram massacre.
(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)
First Published: May 2, 2021 6:31 PM IST
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