Dilip Ghosh vs Kirti Azad: A fight between a sidelined party faithful and a prominent party hopper in Bardhaman-Durgapur

BJP's Ghosh and TMC's in Bardhaman-Durgapur is a clash of personalities that is full of drama and set in an unpredictable terrain.

One is a party faithful sidelined by the political churn; the other is a party hopper who changes political colours in pursuit of personal ambitions. Both are fighting in a constituency that is notoriously fickle. The contest between Dilip Ghosh of the BJP and Kirti Azad of the Trinamool Congress in Bardhaman-Durgapur is a clash of personalities that is full of drama and set in an unpredictable terrain.

Known for his loose cannon statements, the controversial former state president of the BJP, Ghosh is the sitting MP of Medinipur. He had his grooming in the RSS and was sent to Andamans to build the party. After being loaned to the BJP, he was fielded from the Kharagpur Sadar Assembly Constituency in 2016 and won. In 2019, he was made to contest the Medinipur Lok Sabha seat, which he won comfortably, and is now shunted to Bardhaman-Durgapur, where the sitting MP SS Ahluwalia won by a slender margin of 2,439 votes, a punishment constituency indeed. Ironically, he has always delivered seats to the party.

His former party colleague is his opponent in the fight for Bardhaman-Durgapur. Azad, a team member of the first cricket World Cup win in 1983, former BJP MP from Darbhanga, and son of former Bihar Chief Minister, Bhagawat Jha Azad of the Congress, was suspended from BJP after he charged the late Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley of corruption in the Delhi cricket board. He joined the Congress, contested from Dhanbad and lost. He joined TMC in 2021 and is fielded here by the party. He is the TMC in charge of Goa.

The CPI(M) is represented by Sukriti Ghoshal.

The Bardhaman-Durgapur constituency was established in this industrial belt in 2009. Since then no party has been re-elected. In 2009 it was CPI(M ), in 2014 TMC, and in 2019, BJP. The electorate comprising 20 percent Muslims and a large section of the ST community, is still unhappy with the representatives - be it Lok Sabha, Legislature, or Panchayat. They want a better change of situation with the change of guard.