Yusuf Pathan was declared winner, beating Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary on the Baharampur seat.

A key contest was on the anvil in the Baharampur Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, where five-time sitting Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Choudhury was facing both hurdles and advantages in retaining his home seat. 

The main disadvantage was the surprise candidate field by the Trinamool Congress – former India cricketer Yusuf Pathan, the elder brother of another popular former national team player, Irfan Pathan.

A talk was doing the rounds in the political circles of the state that the main aim of the Trinamool leadership (read Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee) in Baharampur was to defeat Choudhury, rather than ensure the victory of the party candidate.

A section of the ruling party leadership believed that it was due to the hardcore anti-Trinamool stand of Choudhury that the seat-sharing talks between the Congress and the Trinamool fell flat.

Choudhury had also claimed that he is aware of the chief minister’s intention of defeating him at any cost, rather than ensuring the victory of her own party candidate.

“That is why she had to import a celebrity candidate from Gujarat with the sole intention of dividing the minority votes, which have always been in Congress’ favour, including in the 2019 polls,” Chowdhury had said earlier.

However, if Yusuf Pathan’s nomination was a challenge for Chowdhury, the same could also be seen as an advantage for the senior Congress leader.

Pathan’s nomination had evoked infighting in the Trinamool leadership in Murshidabad, with many leaders and MLAs from the area threatening to abstain from campaigning while some had even threatened to campaign against the former India all-rounder.

The most vocal among them was Trinamool MLA from Bharatpur, Humayun Kabir, who had said that Pathan’s nomination was not acceptable at all. Although Kabir mellowed his tone after the intervention of the top party leadership and agreed to campaign for Pathan, there were still doubts about the genuineness of his claims.

Another advantage for Chowdhury was that the Left Front, especially the CPI(M), which also had a vote bank and an organisational network in Baharampur, was throwing its full weight behind the state Congress President.

In the middle of the Choudhury-Pathan tussle, the BJP’s bet was Nirmal Kumar Saha, a popular medical practitioner in Baharampur.A greenhorn in politics, Saha’s family members have had a long association with the RSS.