Cooch Behar | Violence, latent complexities likely to seal Nisith Pramanik’s fate on Rajbanshi land

Cooch Behar, West Bengal: BJP stronghold, political complexities, and poll-related violence shape the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Much water has flown down Torsha and Jaldhaka, the two main rivers in the northern Bengal district of Cooch Behar, since junior Union Minister and the BJP’s incumbent Nisith Pramanik swung nearly 32% votes to dislodge the Trinamool Congress (TMC) from this SC-reserved Lok Sabha seat in 2019.

Once considered a fortress of the Left Front partner Forward Bloc which won the seat for an unbroken 32 years from 1977 to 2009, Cooch Behar constituency currently remains a BJP stronghold, with five of the seven Assembly segments in its kitty despite TMC’s landslide victory in the 2021 State polls.

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Revenge could not have been sweeter for Mr. Pramanik, a former Trinamool youth leader who joined the BJP following his expulsion after the 2018 panchayat polls when he stunned his nearest TMC rival Paresh Adhikary by more than 54,000 votes in the 2019 general elections. What rubbed salt in the Trinamool wound was the BJP managing to swing more than 13% of the ruling party votes in the process.

Mr. Pramanik, rewarded with the portfolios of Minister of State in the Home, and Youth Affairs and Sports Ministries two years later following a Union Cabinet reshuffle, earned the distinction of becoming the youngest member of Narendra Modi’s Council of Ministers at the age of 35.

In the 2021 State polls, Mr. Pramanik’s 57-vote victory margin over his arch-rival TMC’s Udayan Guha from Dinhata Assembly segment seemingly convinced the leader to fall back to his position in Parliament instead of moving to the Assembly. Mr. Guha wrested the segment from BJP by a thumping majority in the by-polls held two years later.

Re-nominated as a Lok Sabha poll candidate, Mr. Pramanik takes on Jagadish Barma Basunia – TMC’s face of the Rajbanshi community and the sitting MLA of the Sitai — as his prime challenger this time.