West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is relying on her trusted lieutenants to campaign for her in her own assembly constituency, Bhabanipur, as the BJP's Suvendu Adhikari prepares to challenge her in the upcoming elections.
The south Kolkata constituency, which goes to polls on April 29, is set to witness a high-voltage battle, with Adhikari, once a trusted confidante of Banerjee, joining the BJP in December 2020 and defeating her from Nandigram in 2021.
Banerjee will be away from Kolkata most of the time over the next month as she leads the party's campaign across the state, with veteran leaders close to her leading the campaign in Bhabanipur during her absence.
Firhad Hakim, a cabinet minister and one of Banerjee's trusted lieutenants, campaigned at Chetla in Bhabanipur on Monday and Tuesday, while other leaders such as Aroop Biswas and Subrata Bakshi will also campaign for Banerjee in the constituency.
Bhabanipur has been a TMC bastion since 2011, and Banerjee represented it in 2011 and 2016, but she lost in 2021 and won the by-election in October 2021 with a record margin of 58,832 votes.
Adhikari, however, is confident of winning from Bhabanipur with a margin of 25,000 votes, while the BJP has consistently maintained that the state's rolls have a lot of illegal voters, and that a clean electoral roll will result in the defeat of the TMC.
