In a grand public rally held at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground here on Sunday, March 10, the West Bengal CM and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee announced the party will field its candidates on all 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal for the upcoming 2024 General Elections.
The party renominated 16 sitting MPs and fielded 12 women.
While the party’s general secretary Abhishek Banerjee was fielded from Diamond Harbour, Lok Sabha expelled member Mahua Moitra will fight from Krishnanagar.
The party also nominated former cricketers Yusuf Pathan and Kirti Azad from Baharampur and Bardhaman-Durgapur respectively.
From the Basirhat Lok Sabha seat, where Sandeshkhali is situated, TMC pitted its former MP Haji Nurul Islam by dropping sitting MP Nusrat Jahan.
Congress reacts
On TMC’s Lok Sabha candidates announcement, senior Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said that his party had repeatedly declared its desire to have a respectable seat-sharing agreement with the TMC.
“The Indian National Congress has always maintained that such an agreement has to be finalised through negotiations and not by unilateral announcements. The party has always wanted the INDIA bloc group to fight the BJP together,” he told reporters.
Congress and TMC leaders have been engaged in a war of words in the recent past over seat-sharing in West Bengal, with the Mamata Banerjee-led party asserting that it cannot offer more than two seats to the Congress. The Congress has two MPs from West Bengal.
The TMC is part of the INDIA bloc and has stated that the opposition parties are united in the fight against the BJP to defeat it in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
