Kolkata: Milan Pradhan, the Congress candidate for Nandigram, was arrested on the evening of September 18, hours after former chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced that her faction would support him in the by-election. Police said four non-bailable warrants were pending against the Congress candidate in cases registered during the Nandigram agitation of 2007, carrying charges that included murder, attempt to murder, abduction, armed rioting, and Arms Act offences.He was initially remanded to judicial custody until October 3. Granted interim bail on September 29 after 11 days inside, Pradhan emerged and said that he was asked to withdraw his candidature. Campaign closes on October 4 and polling is on October 6. In effect, Pradhan has spent almost all of the 16-day campaign period in custody.The day after his release, two men who had come to Nandigram to campaign for him were arrested as they left their hotel. Sukriti Ranjan Biswas, a Congress leader associated with the movement for Matua rights, and Manik Fakir, a writer and social activist who had recently joined the party, were taken to Nandigram police station. In a statement, Subhankar Sarkar, the state Congress president, said the incident showed Bengal’s democracy was in a very dangerous place.Important press statement by West Bengal Pradesh Congress President Shri @subhankar_cong :Congress leader Sukriti Ranjan Biswas, one of the leaders of the movement for the rights of the Matua community, and prominent writer and social activist Manik Fakir, who had recently…— West Bengal Congress (@INCWestBengal) September 30, 2026‘It’s only bypolls’Last week, Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, while hearing a plea on Bengal SIR, observed while turning down an appeal for urgent listing of pending special intensive revision appeals, “These are only by-elections.”The very next day, Communist Party of India candidate Shanti Gopal Giri, a schoolteacher, was campaigning in the Muslim-majority pocket of Daudpur when a local Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Abbas Beg, pushed him to the ground and beat him, according to the police complaint. Giri’s clothes were torn. Beg filed a counter-FIR the same day, alleging that Giri had been misleading voters with religious rhetoric.This is just a by-election but one in which one opposition candidate has been in custody for most of the campaign and another was beaten by a leader of the ruling party.Warrants and legal actionPolice say Pradhan had evaded arrest for years and that his arrest formed part of an Election Commission of India-directed drive to execute long-pending non-bailable warrants during elections. On September 22, the government told the Calcutta high court that the warrants against him had been pending since 2021. Pradhan’s lawyers and Congress leaders have challenged the timing and alleged political motivation. The court orally directed that there be no further coercive action in the matters before it.The state government, on September 30, moved the Supreme Court to set aside the interim bail granted by the Calcutta high court. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Bengal government, argued for an urgent hearing, but was denied. There is another part of the chronology. On September 18, the Leader of the Opposition, Ritabrata Banerjee, publicly said that the Democratic Trinamool Congress – the TMC faction under him – had lodged a complaint against Pradhan, citing the pending cases and warrants. Incidentally, the ECI had, only that day, temporarily allotted the rival Trinamool camps separate names and symbols after freezing the original party name and twin-flower symbol for the bypolls. The rival camp received the name Democratic Trinamool Congress and the envelope symbol.The envelope was not free for the taking either. Naushad Siddique’s Indian Secular Front (ISF) had used it in the 2024 Lok Sabha election and again in this year’s assembly election. The ISF is contesting Nandigram and applied for the envelope symbol for the by-election as well. Yet, the Election Commission gave it to the Ritabrata faction and assigned the ISF an ‘almirah’ symbol.The ISF went to the Calcutta high court, and Justice Krishna Rao’s observations to the Election Commission from the bench are revealing. He said:“Why has this symbol been given to another political party and denied to this party? That is the only question. If you had not allotted, there was no cause of action, but you have allotted. They have made out a case that this symbol being given to another party will benefit that party.”Eventually, the court dismissed ISF’s plea.There was another development immediately before Pradhan’s arrest. Sanchita Pradhan Dey, Mamata Banerjee’s candidate for Nandigram, met Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari at Nabanna and then withdrew from the contest. She did not publicly say anything about a connection between the meeting and her decision. Mamata Banerjee’s camp subsequently announced its support for Congress’s Milan Pradhan.Rejinagar and the replicated blueprintThe next evening, Berhampore police arrested the candidate at Rejinagar – the other seat going to polls – backed by Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AJUP), on a case from clashes during the 2021 assembly election. Police also summoned Kabir in a separate case involving an alleged conspiracy to create communal tension. AJUP state secretary Ashik Iqbal was arrested during a vehicle check. Police said counterfeit currency, firearms and ammunition were recovered from the vehicle. Those allegations remain subject to investigation.Kabir and his son Golam Nabi Azad, the AJUP candidate in Rejinagar, have since said that they will stay away from campaigning, citing what Kabir called hostility from the administration. Kabir has complained to the Election Commission alleging selective police targeting. The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) has also withdrawn its Rejinagar candidate from the contest after the Election Commission denied it the use of its traditional ‘spade and shovel’ symbol.Two seats are being contested. Between them, the Congress candidate was custody, two of his campaigners were arrested, the CPI candidate was beaten, the Trinamool candidate withdrew after meeting the CM, the AJUP candidate has stopped campaigning, the RSP has pulled out after losing its symbol, and the ISF is forced to fight on a new symbol.The evolution of an organiserTo understand why the sequence has acquired political resonance, it is useful to look at Suvendu Adhikari’s own evolution between 2007 and 2019. Nandigram in 2007 remains a watershed moment in West Bengal politics. Anyone in the state over the age of 30 knows the significance of those days. They remember the proposed chemical hub, the road blockades, the fourteen dead, and the agrarian revolt that ultimately collapsed thirty-four years of Left Front rule. It is also the movement that forged the political machinery of the state’s current Chief Minister.Political Analyst Sambit Pal’s The Bengal Conundrum describes Suvendu Adhikari as the “architect of Mamata’s success in the Nandigram movement” and says he and his father Sisir Adhikari helped erode the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Lakshman Seth’s dominance in Purba Medinipur. In Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji, jouranilist Snigdhendu Bhattacharya writes that Trinamool Congress and the Maoists came together in Nandigram against the chemical hub. He claimed that Maoist leaders including Madhusudan Mandal and Sudip Chongdar shared platforms with Adhikari, while Trinamool, the SUCI and the Maoists fought the CPI(M) during that phase. Bhattacharya presents this as a tactical front against a common enemy rather than any ideological alignment, and nothing in his account suggests Adhikari was a Maoist.Agricultural land in Nandigram. Photo: Joydeep SarkarBeyond Nandigram, he emerged as a territorial organiser who repeatedly appeared in places where political control was changing hands. The company that movement kept is part of the record.Suman Nath’s People-Party-Policy Interplay in India records how anti-CPI(M) networks that emerged from the PCPA movement in Jangalmahal established a working relationship with the regional Trinamool leadership by January 2011. Nath writes that under Adhikari’s aegis, these networks and the Trinamool approached village headmen and organised shelters for people displaced by the Maoist-Harmad conflict. The relationship reversed once Trinamool held office. Bhattacharya records that the Jana Jagaran Mancha, a Trinamool-backed anti-Maoist outfit, was formed in 2011 under Adhikari’s guidance while he was the party’s West Midnapore in-charge. This group went on to intimidate Maoist supporters.His method shifted again from insurgency to institutional annexation. Deployed as a troubleshooter in Congress and Left strongholds like Murshidabad and Malda in 2016, Adhikari did not wait for elections to seize power in the rural bodies. Instead, he engineered mass defections. On August 12, 2016, 10 members of the Murshidabad zilla parishad joined to Trinamool at an event he attended. Eight of them were from Congress, one from CPI(M), one from Forward Bloc. On September 9, another 10 crossed, giving Trinamool 39 of 70 zilla parishads, and in effect, control of the district. Adhikari was by then both transport minister and the party’s Murshidabad in-charge. Two weeks later, four more Congress members and one CPI(M) member defected in his presence. The Congress sabhadipati was then removed in a 43-0 no-confidence vote. The outgoing sabhadhipati alleged that defections had taken place out of fear. Malda followed a similar route. Trinamool had only six members in the 37-member Zilla Parishad and had failed to win a single assembly seat in the district a few months earlier. Five Congress and seven CPI(M) members joined the party, while two Socialist Party members and one Forward Bloc member declared support, allowing Trinamool to acquire control of the district body without another district election. Adhikari was the party’s Malda in-charge. An Indian Express profile published when Adhikari was preparing to leave Trinamool in 2020 described him as an organiser who had weakened Congress in Murshidabad and Malda “by causing defections” and helped Trinamool capture civic bodies one by one.Both the Congress and the CPI(M) leaders alleged at the time that intimidation, criminal cases and administrative pressure were being used to induce some defections. Adhikari and Trinamool denied coercion and described the switches as voluntary political choices.Also read: Nineteen Years After It Rose in Revolt, Nandigram Heads Into a By-Election Marked by FearThe strategy hardened through the violently contested 2018 panchayat elections. In the run-up to the poll, Adhikari promised a Rs five-crore development reward for gram panchayats in the Haldia Development Authority area that became free of all opposition. He also vowed to make Malda opposition-free.That election returned 20,159 of 58,692 or 34% of rural seats uncontested. The State Election Commission itself had extended the nomination period after receiving complaints that intending candidates and their proposers were being obstructed or prevented from filing papers. The Supreme Court called large-scale obstruction a serious matter and said the Election Commission had responded to a grim situation.The paradox of that annexation strategy is that by hollowing out the Left and Congress, Trinamool destroyed the local structures through which anti-incumbent anger used to be absorbed, and by 2019 the only vehicle left for it was the BJP. When the BJP took 18 Lok Sabha seats that year, Trinamool sent Adhikari to fight the Kharagpur Sadar, Kaliaganj and Karimpur by-elections. He won all three, including the seat the BJP’s own state president had held.In January 2021, weeks after joining the BJP, Adhikari said the 2018 panchayat election was rigged. He admitted that opposition candidates were kept from filing and that armed men surrounded block development offices. Before 2023 Panchayat Election, he went to court asking for central forces, citing 2018, the one in which he took an active role.From partisan mobs to administrative neutralisationThe physical violence remains a fixture of the political landscape of West Bengal, though the targets have shifted. Over the past month, a CPI(M) local committee office in Chandrakona Road was torched hours after a protest procession. A 1960s Left martyrs’ memorial in Jadavpur was desecrated by motorcycle-borne mobs. Masked men ransacked Abhishek Banerjee’s Camac Street office following marathon police interrogations of TMC leaders like Derek O’Brien over an allegedly unauthorised billboard.Cadres, however, are no longer the chief instrument for enforcing political dominance. Where the opposition in 2018 was turned back by partisan mobs lining the roads to block development offices, candidates in 2026 can be neutralised through a revived warrant from 2007 or a last-minute re-allocation of electoral symbols.