The counting for the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections is underway on Sunday (May 2), and all eyes are set on the battleground constituency of Nandigram, where chief minister Mamata Banerjee is locked on a direct electoral contest against her former acolyte Suvendu Adhikari. Once a much-venerated Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader, Adhikari switched camps to the BJP last year after having a fall out with party supremo Banerjee. Now leading the opposition’s efforts against his ex-colleagues, Suvendu Adhikari has set the stage in his home turf of Nandigram for one of the most-watched electoral battles in the state’s history.

Mamata Banerjee-led ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) is massively leading in the counting of votes, extending its lead in 208 seats, ahead of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leads in 80 seats in what has turned out to be a bipolar contest with the Congress-Left Front-ISF alliance putting up a poor show with just 2 leads so far.

TMC has well over double as many seats as BJP with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee now leading against her former protege and BJP candidate Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram.

Suvendu Adhikari, after joining the BJP, had vowed to defeat Mamata Banerjee from Nandigram by more than 50,000 votes, placing his career in politics on the bet. “Write this down and mention the date and time. I will leave politics if I cannot defeat her (Mamata Banerjee) by a half lakh (50,000) votes,” Adhikari had said during a rally in south Kolkata. He had also asked the TMC supremo to prepare a letterhead with ‘former chief minister’ written on it.

Mamata Banerjee, on the other hand, has called Suvendu Adhikari a ‘traitor’ and said that she was wrong to have ‘blindly’ supported the Adhikari family once. Dubbing the turncoat leader as ‘Mir Jafar’ (a name almost synonymous with ‘traitor’ in Bengal’s long political history), Mamata Banerjee said that she won’t be leaving even one inch of soil to Adhikari or any of the opposition leaders.

The battle for Nandigram is important as it was vital for the rise of the Trinamool Congress a decade earlier, when Suvendu, his brother Soumendu, and their father Sisir, as part of the powerful Adhikari family in the region, played a significant role in the anti-land acquisition movement in Nandigram. It was on the back of this struggle that Mamata Banerjee was ultimately able to dislodge in 2011 the 34-year Left Front rule in West Bengal.