Adhir Chowdhury, a name connected to West Bengal politics for more than three decades, is contesting the Assembly elections from the Baharampur constituency, a place widely known as his electoral ‘fort’.
Chowdhury, one of the tallest Congress leaders in West Bengal’s history, started his journey in electoral politics exactly 30 years ago, in the 1996 West Bengal Assembly elections, where he contested from Nabagram in Murshidabad and won with an impressive 55.84% votes.
At the turn of the century, before Chowdhury could complete his term, the Congress decided to field him from Baharampur in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. He again emerged victorious, this time with 46.86% votes and began a stellar journey in national politics that would only come to a screeching halt in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which he lost to the Trinamool Congress’ Yusuf Pathan.
Adhir’s influence soars in Baharampur
After the 1999 elections Chowdhury became the political face of Behrampur. Even during the heydays of the Left Front government in Bengal, his influence in the region kept soaring to greater heights. Adhir repeated his poll victory in 2004, and fetched 51.50% of the total votes polled.
The 2009 general elections, considered a watershed moment in Bengal politics where it became apparent that the tide was turning in favor of the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC (which would soon come to power in 2011) post the Singur and Nandigram land-acquisition-related violence, Adhir further cemented his position as he bagged a whopping 56.91% of votes.
Once the TMC came to power in Bengal, it’s political influence spread across the state, but for two terms (2014 and 2019), Chowdhury was able to maintain his grasp on the electoral fate of Baharampur. He won the 2014 general elections defeating the TMC’s Indranil Sen and in the 2019 elections won against the party’s Apurba Sarkar. It took more than 13 years of TMC rule and a candidate who had nothing to do with Baharampur (the Pathans are from Gujarat, the home state of PM Narendra Modi) to finally break the Adhir fort.
2026 Assembly polls
Although Chowdhury is again in the fray this time around and his fate was sealed on Thursday when Bengal went to vote in the first phase of the assembly polls, what cannot be denied is Chowdhury’s dedication to his party during a time when the Congress has been losing its ground in West Bengal. The only candidate from the Left-Congress alliance to have won the 2021 elections was Bayron Biswas, who just a couple of years later, left the party to join the TMC, reflective of the political climate of the state. 4 May will tell whether Chowdhury gains back his electoral success in Baharampur.
