Hectic parleys are on in Delhi to select the BJP candidate to face West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in the Assembly byelection in Bhabanipur. Mamata Banerjee will be filing her nomination for the Bhabanipur bypoll on Friday.
The list of names sent to Delhi by the state BJP includes Anirban Ganguly, Dinesh Trivedi, Pratap Banerjee, Priyanka Tibrewal, Sajal Ghosh and Biswajit Sarkar.
It is a testing time for the BJP as unlike in rural Bengal, BJP does not have a prominent face in Kolkata. Therefore, the party is partly divided over who should take on Mamata.
Ganguly, honorary director of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, is known to be a skilled orator. And he is part of the party's intellectual cell.
Trivedi and Tibrewal are being thought of as the constituency has almost 35 per cent non-Bengali population. Many slum-dwellers in Bhabanipur are from Bihar.
Tibrewal is one of the lawyers who fought for a CBI probe on post-poll violence in West Bengal. She is a good orator as well. But she lost the last election in Entally Assembly seat of Kolkata. But the BJP feels that Tibrewal's candidature could remind the people about "horrific" post-poll retributive violence.
But some leaders felt that putting a victim as a candidate itself would serve that purpose. A section of leaders are vouching for Biswajit Sarkar, brother of Kolkata's slain youth wing leader, Abhijit Sarkar. Abhijit was allegedly beaten to death by TMC workers in the intervening night of May 2 and May 3. His pet dogs were killed before he was.
The family did not cremate his body till the Calcutta High Court ordered autopsy to be done in Army hospital of Kolkata. On September 9, the family received the body after all kinds of forensic tests were done by Command Hospital in Kolkata and they took out a rally before cremating it.
"Who can be a better person other than brother of Abhijit?" asked a BJP leader in West Bengal.
Pratap Banerjee is a low-profile state vice president of BJP, and Sajal Ghosh had risen to fame as police recently raided his house in Kolkata and he fought hard in court to get bail. He is the son of a prominent former Congress leader of Kolkata Pradip Ghosh.
Apart from these names, the party is also mulling few other names like Tathagata Roy, who took a lead in 2014 Lok Sabha election from Bhabanipur. And some are in favour to give Rudranil Ghosh, the defeated candidate of 2021 election from the same seat, another chance.
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But political observers feel that even if BJP state chief Dilip Ghosh decides to contest against Mamata, it would be an almost impossible task to beat the chief minister on her home turf.
But even if the party is busy in finalising the name for the hot seat, this election would not be like other elections as physical campaigning is banned. Candidates can campaign through small meetings with minimum gathering, with numbers to be fixed by Election Commission. No road show, public rally or door-to-door campaign will be held.
So, it looks like a dull election. But the situation will be charged as this byelection is a do-or-die battle for Mamata Banerjee.
