Rumour mills agog over Suvendu’s political future

Kolkata/Haldia: There was intense speculation all of Friday over

Suvendu

Adhikari’s

next political destination

after he resigned from the Cabinet and two state-run bodies, the Hooghly River Bridge Commissioners and Haldia Development Authority.

Though Suvendu is still a Trinamool Congress MLA and an active member of the party, the flow of things point to his looking for different political shores. There are four options before Suvendu — stay back in TMC with increased power, float a new political platform, join the Congress as its Lok Sabha leader (Adhir Chowdhury has been wooing him) or take the plunge for BJP. Sources in HDA hinted that the rebel leader indicated to his loyalists at a closed-door meeting he would join the saffron camp.

Suvendu has been weighing options all these days increasing his district outreach through party-less platforms, trying to carve out an identity away from his party portfolios. Some of Suvendu's friends in TMC became enemies while he gained new friends in the process. The rebel leader was busy making a balance sheet of the gains and losses.

One reason for his dilemma could be that Suvendu is an MLA from Nandigram that has a heavy Muslim presence. His core supporters come from a Congress-Trinamool background, a section of which doesn’t like the leader joining BJP. The rebel leader is not very sure how Nandigram voters would react if he joined BJP despite his secular credentials. In that case, floating a new platform was an option for him.

But Suvendu loyalists say he was not very confident of making much headway at a

time Bengal

’s politics has taken a bipolar shape centering round Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee. With an independent platform, Suvendu might have had to tie up with either BJP or Congress for survival. Chances of the latter also became remote after the Congress high command chose to go with Left in Bengal when the Adhikari family is known for its diehard anti-Left stance.

Bengal BJP

was not sitting idle. Its leaders reached out to East Midnapore like never before to win over “Amra Dadar Anugami” loyalists by targeting Mamata and her nephew Abhishek. Kailash Vijayvargiya and Dilip Ghosh held a number of rallies in the two Midnapores, putting indirect pressure on Suvendu to come out of his “ambivalence”.

Trinamool, while continuing to talk to him, dropped former chairman of Midnapore Municipality and Suvendu loyalist Pranab Basu from the board of administrators, sending out clear signals on what was in store. Mamata took Trinamool senior and MP Kalyan Bandyopadhyay to the Bankura administrative meeting and also made him the HRBC chairman days after the latter hit out at the “Adhikari dynasty’s rule” in East Midnapore, narrowing down Suvendu’s chances to keep the guessing game going on for some more time.