Suvendu Adhikari | The Bengal pivot

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Weeks before Suvendu Adhikari defected from the Trinamool Congress to join the BJP in December 2020, several senior Trinamool leaders tried to persuade him to stay. But Mr. Adhikari’s close aides knew that he had made up his mind: he wanted to become the Chief Minister of West Bengal — an ambition he could never realise had he remained with the Trinamool.

Mr. Adhikari was the most promising of the second generation of Trinamool leaders until Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee emerged on the political scene. At the age of 27, Abhishek was elected MP from the Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha seat in 2014. By then, Mr. Adhikari had emerged as a prominent Trinamool leader who challenged the organisational might of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) during the Nandigram protests.

Mr. Adhikari comes from a political family in West Bengal’s coastal Purba Medinipur district. His father Sishir Adhikari was associated with the Congress and then with the Trinamool when the party was set up in 1998.

Trinamool rebellion reaches Delhi: 20 party MPs in talks with Union Minister Bhupendra Yadav

It was the fight against land acquisition at Singur and Nandigram that catapulted Ms. Banerjee and the Trinamool to power in 2011, ending 34 years of Left Front rule in West Bengal. Mr. Adhikari was at the forefront of these protests. From the victims of Nandigram shooting in 2007 to those killed in communal violence in Murshidabad in 2025, many families of victims say that Mr. Adhikari stood by them when few others did.

After the Trinamool came to power in 2011, Mr. Adhikari started extending his political influence across south and central Bengal, bringing MLAs, civic bodies and strongholds of the CPI(M)-led Left Front and the Congress into the Trinamool’s fold. In 2016, he joined the Cabinet headed by Ms. Banerjee and became one of the most influential Ministers, in charge of the Transport and Environment Department.

The most challenging part of Mr. Adhikari’s political journey came after he