Trinamool Congress may have set in motion a “giant killer” mission for Pabitra Kar, when the ruling party declared him as the candidate to take on BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal’s Nandigram.
Kar, who defected to the TMC from the BJP hours before the list was announced on Tuesday, may be a Nandigram “insider” but he was also known to be a Suvendu Adhikari “loyalist”.
But is that what the TMC is banking on as it pits a candidate, already politically familiar with Adhikari, to take him down in his own fortress? If it succeeds, then it will be a “surgical strike” in the electoral landscape of the Medinipur region.
Kar, a former local strongman for the BJP and a one-time close associate of Adhikari, rejoined his former party. This is not, however, merely a homecoming but the opening gambit of an aggressive strategy by the TMC to reclaim Nandigram.
Nandigram, the bedrock of the TMC’s emergence in Bengal politics, and also where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee lost to Adhikari in a closely fought contest in the 2021 election. Hence, by fielding Kar directly against his former mentor, the TMC has signalled that it is ready to fight fire with fire.
‘SON OF THE SOIL’
Kar, the former panchayat pradhan of Boyal-1 gram panchayat in the Nandigram-2 block, is being pitched as a “son of the soil”.
This is a rebranding aimed at dismantling the “outsider” narrative Mamata Banerjee had to face in 2021. Ironically, Kar was one of the chief architects of that campaign.
In November 2020, he followed Adhikari out of the TMC to join the BJP. During the 2021 polls, he became far more than a foot soldier and was key to the BJP’s organisational strength in the Boyal area.
His intimate knowledge of the region was instrumental in securing the leads that allowed Adhikari to defeat Banerjee by a slender margin of 1,956 votes. He possesses a deep understanding of the opposition BJP’s booth management tactics, having run those very booths in 2021 and is aware of what drives voter turnout.
Hence, the TMC believes he could dismantle his own carefully laid groundwork and turn it around to his own advantage. The party said his return was motivated by his “dissatisfaction with the BJP’s anti-people stance”: this message can be amplified at the grassroots level. His return to the ruling party also creates an immediate crisis for the BJP’s local administration.
His wife is currently a winning BJP candidate serving as a panchayat pradhan in the region. His move back to the TMC, therefore, creates a dynamic that threatens to fracture the BJP’s grassroots base from within.
If the network that Kar built follows him back to the TMC, the BJP could potentially be in trouble. While the TMC traditionally holds a strong lead in Nandigram-1, the Nandigram-2 block has been the BJP’s crucial buffer.
Analysts said even a 5 percent swing in this block, triggered by Kar’s influence, could be enough to wipe out the narrow victory margin the BJP enjoyed in the previous election.
