The speculations of Mamata Banerjee entering the Parliament after her loss to Suvendu Adhikari in the 2026 Assembly elections intensified after former cricketer Sourav Ganguly issued a major statement on Saturday.
Ganguly declared that he was not involved in any kind of plan to try getting the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief the Baharampur seat from where she could contest the Lok Sabha bypolls.
"The allegations ... in so far as they concern me, are in reckless disregard of the truth," he wrote in a statement, lashing out at the media for "falling prey to rumours".
Ganguly was responding to claims allegedly made on the front page of the Bengali newspaper Anandabazar Patrika, which had stated that he had contacted Yusuf Pathan, who currently holds the Baharampur Lok Sabha constituency, in order to ask him to vacate it for Mamata Banerjee.
Also a former cricketer, Pathan won the Baharampur seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections under the TMC ticket, defeating two-time Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by a margin of 85,022 votes.
Election Commission of India (ECI) data also showed that he had received 5,24,516 votes, while Chowdhury had got 4,39,494 votes. The BJP candidate, Dr Nirmal Kumar Saha, had come in third with 3,71,885 votes.
Ganguly also pointed out that the newspaper had claimed Pathan had refused to vacate Baharampur, reiterating that he had neither asked the TMC leader to vacate the seat, nor was he acting on Mamata Banerjee's instructions.
"I have never been involved in political matters at any stage with any one concerned," he added in the statement.
The speculations around Mamata Banerjee's possible entry into the Lok Sabha also come at a time when her party sees itself in a serious crisis, due to the exodus of a rebel bloc of MLAs led by expelled TMC leader Ritabrata Banerjee, who went on to become the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the West Bengal Assembly.
Despite the TMC now attempting to challenge this decision in the Calcutta High Court, the optics of what is now called the 'Ritabrata model' has also begun affecting the party's MPs, which are also considering a similar jump amid Abhishek Banerjee's growing unpopularity within the party ranks.
