The Trinamool Congress has nominated four former party MPs for the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday announced on the Twitter that out of the four candidates two will be women.
She wrote “I am glad to announce that AITC will be nominating Arpita Ghosh, Mausam Noor, Dinesh Trivedi and Subrata Bakshi to the Rajya Sabha. As a part of my constant endeavour towards woman empowerment, I am proud that half of our nominations are women,” reminding that the party’s decision to nominate the women candidates came on International Women's Day.
The four candidates nominated for the March 26 elections are former Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi, former South Kolkata Lok Sabha Member and TMC Bengal president Subrato Bakshi, theatre personality Arpita Ghosh who was an MP between 2014 and 2019 before losing to the BJP from Balurghat seat and former North Malda MP Mausam Benazir Noor who had crossed over to the TMC before the last year’s Lok Sabha elections only to lose the seat to BJP’s Khagen Murmu.
Bengal will send five MPs to Rajya Sabha this time round out of which four of the TMC are almost certain to win the polls considering the party’s strength in the Bengal Assembly. However the fifth seat that is going to be vacated by expelled CPI(M) MP Ritabrata Banerjee is likely to get a joint Left-Congress candidate.
Though the Left has 28 seats and the Congress has 42 seats in the State Assembly the former is likely to stake its claim on the ground that it had earlier left another seat to the latter.
Whether TMC would field a candidate in the fifth seat will be decided later, party sources said.
The Rajya Sabha seats from Bengal are falling vacant on April 2 following the end of the tenures of Trinamool MPs KD Singh a businessman, former minister-turned-bureaucrat Manish Gupta, painter Jogen Chowdhury, and media personality Ahmed Hassan Imran.
Taking a dig at the Chief Minister for fielding four former MPs who had lost the Lok Sabha elections (save Bakshi) Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh on Sunday said “it is a shame that the TMC is trying to project all the candidates who were rejected by the people in the general elections.”
The Chief Minister’s bid to “send the rejected leaders to Parliament through ‘back door’ will not be taken well by the people of Bengal who will give a befitting reply” to the ruling outfit in the next year’s Assembly elections, Ghosh said.
Meanwhile in an unrelated development the TMC renewed its campaign against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register for Citizens taking out a huge women’s rally in central Kolkata on Sunday.
The rally was partaken by a number of senior TMC women leaders including ministers Chandrima Bhattacharya, Shahsi Panja who carried handis (metal pots) used for cooking rice even as they raised slogans saying the country did not want CAA but “we want bhaat (bread and butter).”
Bhattacharya said “this is a statement for the central Government which has failed to provide people with their basic needs and now is trying to divide them along religious lines to stick to power.”