Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, Bengal’s agriculture minister, has resigned from his Bhabanipur seat to allow chief minister Mamata Banerjee to win a by-poll election to the state legislature.
“I want Mamata Banerjee to contest from the seat. This has been her seat for long,” Chattopadhyay said after tendering his resignation to Speaker Biman Banerjee on Friday. He also said that he had resigned following the party’s decision.
Banerjee is expected to run for the seat in the by-poll, according to Trinamool insiders. Despite her party trouncing the BJP by winning 213 of the 294 seats in the recently concluded assembly elections, she lost by 1,736 votes in Nandigram to aide-turned-turncoat Suvendu Adhikari.
It is unclear if Chattopadhyay will run for another seat to keep his job as minister, or whether he will be one of the Trinamool’s Rajya Sabha nominees. Since three BJP MPs resigned as MLAs after being elected, by-elections for at least four other seats will be held alongside Bhabanipur.
Banerjee first ran for the Bhabanipur seat in a 2011 byelection. Since the Trinamool Congress first came to power, Subrata Bakshi vacated the seat for her. Banerjee, who was the Union railway minister when her party swept the Bengal elections, ran for the state assembly in a by-election. She ran for the seat again in 2016.
Following Adhikari’s last-minute withdrawal from the party in 2021, she agreed to challenge him on his home turf. Within six months of the foundation of her new government, Banerjee would become a member of the assembly.
