Isha Khan Chowdhury emerged as the Congress party’s sole flag bearer in West Bengal to the lower house of Parliament, with other candidates of the party getting virtually routed from the respective seats they contested from.
Khan Chowdhury, as reported by multiple TV channels, won the Malda Dakshin seat by a margin of more than 1.15 lakh votes over his nearest rival, Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sreeupa Mitra Chaudhury, aka Nirbhaya Didi. Trinamool Congress candidate Shahnawaz Ali Raihan finished the contest as a distant third.
Official data from the Election Commission of India website, however, showed that Khan Chowdhury was leading over the BJP candidate by over 1.2 lakh votes with the last few rounds of counting still in progress.
Khan Chowdhury’s feat in the state would perceptively help keep up the morale of the Congress party high in the run-up to the state polls due in two year’s time in a situation when top leaders of the party, including Bengal Pradesh Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury from the neighbouring seat of Baharampur, failed to hold on to their seats in the face of a Trinamool political onslaught. A member of the perceptibly first family of Malda that’s entrenched in politics, Khan Choudhury is the son of erstwhile Congress MP Abu Hasem Khan Chowdhury alias Dalu da and nephew to the late Congress patriarch ABA Ghani Khan Choudhury.
He also has Abu Nasar Khan Choudhury as his other uncle and Masuam Noor as cousin, both of whom served as parliamentarians. Both of his uncles have remained former cabinet ministers in the central government.
Khan Chowdhury himself served as a Congress MLA twice before, first from the Baishnabnagar seat in Malda from 2011 to 2016 and from Sujapur from 2016 to 2021.
Known for his soft-spoken and erudite demeanour, Isha, who spent the early years of his life in Canada, earned his popularity among the locals for remaining in close contact with his grassroots despite getting virtually routed in the 2021 state polls by the TMC.
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