Congress's candidate for the Nandigram Assembly bypoll, Milan Pradhan, was arrested on Thursday in connection with a non-bailable case linked to the 2007 violence in the area, an arrest that landed just hours after Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee announced her faction's support for his candidature.
The sequence of events unfolded quickly. Sanchita Pradhan Dey, who had been fielded by Banerjee's camp for the Nandigram seat, withdrew her candidature after a meeting with Suvendu Adhikari at Nabanna, leaving the Trinamool without a nominee of its own in the contest. Banerjee responded by throwing her support behind Pradhan, the Congress nominee, only for his arrest to follow within hours.
The West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee reacted sharply to the timing, with party president Subhankar Sarkar alleging a conspiracy behind the sudden move to enforce a case that had been dormant for years. The party framed the arrest as an attempt to stifle democratic contestation in the seat rather than a routine legal action, pointing to how closely it followed Banerjee's endorsement.
The case against Pradhan traces back to the 2007 unrest in Nandigram, a period that left a lasting mark on West Bengal's politics after violent clashes over land acquisition in the area years earlier. Specific details of the charge against him were not immediately made public, but its non-bailable nature means Pradhan is likely to remain in custody through at least the early stretch of campaigning for the seat.
Nandigram goes to the polls alongside the Rejinagar constituency on October 6, and Pradhan's arrest has added a fresh layer of uncertainty to a contest that had already been reshaped within a single day by a withdrawal, a cross party endorsement and now a criminal case reaching back nearly two decades.