Congress candidate Milan Pradhan (L) and Mamata Banerjee (R). File. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement, ANI
Congress candidate Milan Pradhan for the by-election for the Nandigram constituency was arrested on Friday (September 18, 2026) by the West Bengal police in an old case. This came an hour after Mamata Banerjee said she would support the Congress candidate after her own candidate withdrew the nomination.
“I am shocked by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s aggressive mentality; they will not let anyone contest the elections. Will no other party exist, and will there be no democracy?“ Congress State president Subhankar Sarkar said after their candidate’s arrest.
Mr. Sarkar also said that their candidate was getting threat calls that he may be picked up by the police and that he was worried about his safety.
Criticising Mr. Pradhan’s arrest, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said it was “a brazen attempt at voter chori and chunav chori (voter and election theft)”. “The BJP is so insecure that even in a by-election, it is misusing agencies to target and arrest an Opposition candidate. The Congress will neither be intimidated nor silenced,” he said in a post on X.
Sources in the Congress alleged that WBPCC general secretary Subhasish Bhattacharya had also been arrested.
“Mr. Pradhan is a strong candidate; that is why arresting him in an old case is not a good image for democracy. If the warrant was pending against him for so long, then what were you doing for so long? This is completely politically motivated,” senior Congress leader and spokesperson Suman Roy Choudhuri told The Hindu on Friday (September 18, 2026).
Mr. Pradhan was one of the frontline leaders during the Nandigram protests, according to Congress leaders.
On Friday afternoon (September 18, 2026), Sanchita Pradhan (De), the Mamata All India Trinamool Congress candidate for Nandigram, revoked her nomination after an alleged meeting with Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari.
However, police sources have said that this arrest has no relation to the elections, and the arrest was merely based on an old case against Mr. Pradhan.
Nandigram is a prestige constituency for all parties in elections, because it is Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s home bastion, and he had already won from this seat in the Assembly polls, for which he resigned and kept his MLA position in the Bhabanipur seat. Mr. Adhikari won this seat by 9665 votes in the 2026 elections. In the 2021 elections, Ms. Banerjee lost to Mr. Adhikari in this seat by a margin of 1956 votes.
Published – September 18, 2026 06:36 pm IST
