NEW DELHI, July 5: Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of the veteran Congress leader and former president Pranab Mukherjee, popularly known as “Pranabda,” joined the Trinamool Congress on Monday.
“The way Mamata Banerjee halted the recent communal wave by BJP, I believe that in the future, with the support of others, she would be able to do the same in the entire country,” said Abhijit Mukherjee, in his first comments after joining the Trinamool.
A successor to his father as a former Congress MP from Jangipur and an MLA from Nalhati, Abhijit is likely to be offered by the TMC the Jangipur Assembly seat which is due to go for a bypoll as a candidate there had passed away just before the polling and the elections were countermanded.
Abhijit Mukherjee’s father Pranab Mukherjee won the Jangipur parliamentary constituency in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district twice as a Congress MP till he vacated it in 2012 to run for President. Abhijit won bypolls in the Jangipur parliamentary constituency after his father vacated the seat in 2012; he won it again in 2014 but lost to the Trinamool’s Khalilur Rahman in 2019.
The Congress, which fought the Bengal elections in partnership with the Left, was decimated with both the parties drawing blank for the first time in the state. Abhijit was the chairman of the Congress campaign committee during the Assembly elections.
Even though he is not a political heavyweight, his shift to TMC could be a major embarrassment for the Congress, which has lost some of its prominent faces in recent years.
Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Himanta Biswa Sarma are some of the prominent leaders who left the Congress to join the BJP in the past few years.
The former President’s daughter Sharmistha Mukherjee is a Congress leader in Delhi.
(Manas Dasgupta)