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The Congress in West Bengal was stunned on Tuesday after the party's prime mover in the state, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, looked to be headed for a comprehensive defeat on his home turf of Baharampur.
Chowdhury, as per Election Commission of India data, was trailing with almost 60,000 votes behind Trinamool Congress's star candidate and cricketer-turned-politician Yusuf Pathan even as counting drew to a near close.
Owing to Chowdhury's possible defeat in the Baharampur parliamentary seat, among the last-standing perceived Congress fortresses of the state, this would be the first time that Trinamool Congress would have its flag grafted and flying from the region.
An MP from Baharampur since 1999 and the reigning Pradesh Congress president of West Bengal, this was perhaps Chowdhury's toughest electoral challenge which came in the form Pathan, the non-resident TMC candidate.
While Chowdhury defeated RSP's Pramothes Mukherjee thrice in a row during the erstwhile Left Front era in West Bengal during his first three terms as an MP, the Congress leader had successfully overcome challenges from his prime TMC opponents during the 2014 and 2019 editions of the Lok Sabha polls during the Mamata Banerjee era.
Believed to be in defiance of the wishes of the Congress high command, Chowdhury was instrumental in stitching a seat-sharing arrangement with the Left in Bengal to take on the Banerjee-led ruling dispensation of the state in the current elections despite both sides remaining stakeholders in the opposition's INDIA bloc at the national level.
A vociferous critic of Banerjee since the Congress's alliance with the TMC fell through after the 2011 Assembly polls and subsequent erosion of the former's political foothold in the state bolstered by large-scale defections to the Trinamool, Chowdhury has consistently built his political narrative advocating for an alliance with the Left to simultaneously take on both the BJP and TMC in Bengal.
That alliance, forged in the 2016 and 2021 state polls and which partially materialized into a seat-sharing arrangement in the 2019 general elections, was believed to be working better in the current edition of the Lok Sabha polls.
However, with both the vote share and the number of seats of Left-Congress combine set to be sliding further in Bengal compared to its 2019 figures, that perception seems to be a myth that the hard ground reality of Bengal's poll turf has now busted.
The possible drubbing of the duo would inevitably bring not just the alliance experiment under scanner but also leave the political future of Chowdhury himself wide open.