BJP’s feisty Tibrewal to take on Mamta Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 10

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today filed nomination papers as the BJP fielded Priyanka Tibrewal against her in the September 30 bypoll to the Bhabanipur seat.

Tibrewal, a lawyer, is one of the petitioners in the post-poll violence cases against the TMC government in the Calcutta High Court. The party also announced the names of Milan Ghosh and Sujit Das for Samserganj and Jangipur seats, respectively.

“Mamata has already lost from Nandigram. Now she is fighting this election to save the CM’s chair. My task will be to reach out to the people of the constituency and inform them about the atrocities, the torture and violence that her party unleashed on opposition workers after the Assembly polls. I am confident that people of Bhabanipur will vote for me and defeat her,” she asserted.

Tibrewal, currently the state vice president of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the BJP’s youth wing, had joined the party in 2014.

She had her first brush with electoral politics in 2015, when she contested the Kolkata Municipal Corporation election and lost.

She contested the 2021 Assembly polls from the Entally seat and lost again to a TMC candidate by a staggering margin of more than 58,000 votes.

BJP sources said she was chosen to lock horns with Mamata because of her “fighting spirit” and also as not many leaders were ready to contest.

Meanwhile, the names of BJP heavyweights, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and party president JP Nadda, who came almost daily to West Bengal during the Assembly elections in the state, were missing from the star campaigners’ list.

Names figuring in the list include Hardeep Singh Puri and Smriti Irani, BJP national spokesperson Shahnawaj Hussain and MP Manoj Tiwari. Puri is being brought specifically for Bhabanipur where there is a concentration of Sikh voters.

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