Congress hopes to bounce back in Chowranghee

With Bengal all set for the third phase of poll tomorrow, eyes are on the historic Chowranghee assembly seat in the city where Congress is hoping to bounce back under the leadership of Somen Mitra.
With around 204373 voters, the constituency is all set to witness a three cornered fight between Congress, which is fighting in an alliance with CPI(M), ruling TMC and BJP.
The Chowranghee assembly seat has, since its inception, been a Congress bastion which has elected Congress stalwarts and former Chief Ministers like Bidhan Chandra Roy and Siddhartha Sankar Ray.
The Chowranghee constituency which had always elected a Congressman as their representative except in 1977, changed loyalty in 2001 and chose a TMC nominee as their representative.

In 2011, Mitra's wife Sikha fought the poll battle from the seat as a TMC candidate when the party had allied with Congress and won by more than 57,000 votes, securing 71 percent of the total votes polled.
She resigned from her post as MLA and joined Congress in 2014.

In the 2014 assembly bypoll, TMC's Nayana Bandopadhyay, wife of the party's MP Sudip Bandopadhyay, won the seat by a margin of more than 14,000 votes by defeating her nearest BJP rival.
Mitra, a seven-time MLA and one-time MP (from TMC), is a known figure in Chowringhee constituency area, and is all set to contest from this seat as a Congress candidate. He will take on sitting MLA Nayana Bandopadhyay.

BJP's Ritesh Tiwari, SUCI(C), LJP and three other independents are also in fray for the seat.
Mitra, who had joined TMC in 2009 and was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Diamond Harbour constituency that year as its candidate, resigned from the party and joined his parent party in February 2014.
A known name in Bengal politics since the late sixties, Mitra, known for his organisational skills, is one of the main architects of Congress and CPI(M) alliance in Bengal.