Manas Ranjan Bhunia, the Trinamool Congress candidate from Sabang assembly constituency in West Bengal, is a recent entrant to the party. The 69-year-old politician, who is a doctor by training, decided to jump ships in 2016, dumping his then party Congress after representing it in the assembly for close to three decades.
Bhunia, who was sent to Rajya Sabha by his new party, is an entrenched politician in his constituency that falls in Paschim Medinipur district. He represented the seat for three straight terms in 1982, 1987 and 1991, then again in 2006, 2011 and 2016. After the 2016 elections, Bhunia, disappointed with the Congress state leadership, joined the Trinamool Congress.
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Earlier, Manas Bhunia’s brother Bikash Bhunia had also left the Congress and joined Mamata Banerjee’s party. Soon after the cross-over, Manas Bhunia was named by Banerjee as one of the party’s nominees to the Rajya Sabha.
The six-time MLA’s problems with the Congress started over the post of public accounts committee (PAC) chairperson. He was suspended from his former party after he refused to step down from the post. The coalition partners Congress and the Left had decided to make the CPM’s Sujan Chakraborty the PAC chairperson, but Bhunia refused to vacate the post.
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The sitting MLA from Sabang is from the Trinamool, who won the 2017 by-poll by more than 64,000 votes. The by-poll was necessitated when Bhunia crossed over to Trinamool and was elected to Rajya Sabha.
Bhunia is this time pitted against the BJP’s Amulya Maity and the Congress’s Chiranjib Bhowmik. Sabang goes to polls on April 1, the second phase of 8-phase polling in West Bengal. The votes will be counted on May 2.