With no member of legislative assembly (MLA) and only one Lok Sabha member in West Bengal, the Congress is hoping to regain lost ground in West Bengal’s Murshidabad and Malda districts in the run-up to the 2026 assembly polls with its former Lok Sabha member Mausam Benazir Noor returning from the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), state leaders said.
The two Muslim-majority districts account for 34 of Bengal’s 294 assembly seats of which TMC and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 215 and 75 respectively in the 2021 state polls. Even the Left parties could not win any seat that year.
TMC’s Rajya Sabha member Noor, 46, who rejoined Congress on Saturday, said she wants to restore the legacy of her uncle ABA Gani Khan Chowdhury, the senior Congress leader from Malda who served as Union railway and coal minister in the cabinets of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. He, in fact, was India’s first coal minister.
“I will resign from the Rajya Sabha on Monday. Bengal needs change. Let that begin with me,” Noor said in Delhi in the presence of her cousin Isha Khan Chowdhury, Bengal’s sole Congress Lok Sabha member representing the Malda South seat in which two of the seven assembly segments are in Murshidabad district.
The Malda South and the Malda North Lok Sabha seats were formed during the 2009 delimitation by splitting the old Malda seat that Gani Khan Chowdhury won eight times between 1980 and 2004 before his death in 2006.
Noor won Malda North for the Congress in 2009 and 2014. After joining TMC in 2019, she lost the seat to BJP’s Khagen Murmu that year although Isha Khan Chowdhury, who contested for Congress, and she together polled around 0.2 million more votes than Murmu. The political divide in the Khan Chowdhury family helped the BJP, local people said.
Former Bengal PCC president Pradip Bhattacharya told HT that Noor’s return to the Congress is a step towards the party’s revival in Murshidabad and Malda which were Congress strongholds for decades till TMC and Congress fought as allies and ousted the Left Front government in 2011. Although the two parties formed the government that year, the alliance collapsed with Congress accusing TMC of engineering defections in the smaller parties. The INDIA coalition did not work out in Bengal in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as well.
“Our study shows Gani Khan Chowdhury still occupies a place in the hearts of Malda and Murshidabad residents for the development work he carried out. TMC and BJP have not been able to erase his legacy. Noor’s return will help the Congress,” Bhattacharya said.
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“The first adversary of the Congress is BJP,” Noor said on Saturday.
Soumya Aich Roy, an AICC member from Bengal, said, “Noor was our MP and she also served as the state Youth Congress president. To make the party stronger, Congress always welcomes secular leaders.”
The TMC, too, strengthened its base in both districts in the last state and Lok Sabha polls. In 2021, TMC even wrested Malda’s Sujapur assembly seat that Gani Khan Chowdhury and his family members won from 1967 till 2016.
Despite speculations that Noor might contest the Sujapur seat next year, the state’s ruling party did not make any statement on her till Sunday evening.
“We don’t have anything to say,” TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said.
