By Ananya Sharma 
Kolkata, May 20: Two days before Falta goes back to the booths, the Trinamool Congress has lost its own candidate.
Jahangir Khan, TMC’s man for the Falta Assembly repoll on May 21, called a press conference on Tuesday and announced he was done. No party backing for the decision. No consultation, apparently. Just a candidate standing before cameras, citing development packages and peace, and walking away from a contest that was already burning hot before he even showed up.
The timing alone made people sit up. The legal troubles, the FIRs, the court hearing just a day before, the reference to Suvendu Adhikari as “our Chief Minister” even though Khan belongs to the party that considers Adhikari the enemy. There is a lot here that a single press conference does not fully explain.
Khan Steps Back, But the Words Do Not Add Up
What Khan said publicly was straightforward enough on the surface. “I am the son of Falta and I want Falta to remain peaceful and progress. Our Chief Minister is providing a special package for the development of Falta, which is why I have decided to step away,” he told reporters, as per PTI.
That sentence about Suvendu Adhikari being “our Chief Minister” landed hard. In Bengal’s political context, with TMC and BJP locked in a bitter, almost personal rivalry since well before the 2026 Assembly polls, a TMC candidate citing the BJP Chief Minister’s development scheme as the reason to pull out is not a neutral statement. It reads as something else entirely, though what exactly remains unclear.
His stated vision had been “Sonar Falta,” a golden Falta. That phrase did not survive contact with reality.
There is also a procedural problem that has not been cleanly resolved. The last date for official withdrawal of candidature had already passed before Khan made his announcement on Tuesday. So technically, his name may still sit on the EVM when voters walk in on Thursday morning. Whether his exit holds any ballot validity at all is uncertain, as per available reports.
TMC’s Awkward Response
The party moved fast after the news broke. On X, the All India Trinamool Congress put out a statement that did the minimum it needed to do, no more. “The decision taken by Jahangir Khan to withdraw from the Falta re-poll is his personal decision and not that of the party,” it read.
From there, the statement shifted into a long list of grievances. More than 100 TMC workers arrested in Falta since the May 4 results. Party offices vandalised. Some shut down by force in broad daylight. The Election Commission ignoring complaint after complaint. And then this line, which was almost an admission in itself: “However, some eventually succumbed to the pressure and chose to step away from the field.”
The party did not name Khan in that sentence. It did not have to.
So TMC is officially calling this a personal decision while also explaining, in the same breath, why pressure from the BJP and the administration has been overwhelming enough to break people. Both things cannot be entirely true at the same time without one of them doing a lot of heavy lifting. The party’s own framing inadvertently suggests that Khan’s exit was not just personal restlessness.
The Man Who Called Himself Pushpa
Before any of this, Jahangir Khan had already made himself the most talked-about name coming out of the April 29 polling day in Falta.
When IPS officer Ajay Pal Sharma, the official police observer deployed in Bengal, issued a public warning to Khan’s family against intimidating voters, Khan’s response was to invoke Pushpa, the stubborn, swaggering film character who refuses to bend. The clip travelled fast. It did not age well.
What followed was five FIRs. One on May 5, three more on May 10, and another on May 15. All of them connect to the events of April 29, covering allegations of voter intimidation and broader electoral violations, according to IANS. By the time repoll day was approaching, Khan was staring at potential arrest.
He filed an anticipatory bail plea before the Calcutta High Court. On Monday, a single-judge bench of Justice Saugata Bhattacharya granted him interim protection from any coercive police action until the repoll process concludes and results are declared, with that protection covering all five FIRs.
That hearing was on Monday. He withdrew on Tuesday.
That sequence of events is what political observers in Bengal are sitting with right now.
What Actually Went Wrong in Falta on April 29
The repoll was not ordered on a whim. The Election Commission of India, after what it called a “detailed investigation,” found enough to describe the original polling as “severe electoral offences and subversion of the democratic process.”
The central allegation was specific and damaging: ballot unit buttons on EVMs at multiple polling stations had been covered with black tape, physically blocking voters from choosing certain candidates. The BJP button, at least at Booth No. 177 in Debipur, was reportedly masked with white adhesive. BJP candidate Debangshu Panda and voters raised this during polling itself.
The ECI found that 60 booths were directly implicated, covering roughly 53,967 voters, just under 23 percent of the entire Falta electorate. CCTV footage was partially unavailable at several locations, which the commission noted was not accidental. Its letter to West Bengal’s Chief Election Officer said that earlier scrutiny had been done “mechanically and hurriedly,” relying on official records without properly examining the video that did exist.
When they looked at the footage, they found what earlier scrutiny had missed.
The result: a full repoll across all 285 polling stations in the constituency, with polling hours from 7 am to 6 pm on May 21 and counting set for May 24.
What Suvendu Adhikari Said, and What It Meant
The Chief Minister did not offer sympathy. When reporters caught up with Suvendu Adhikari during his Falta roadshow on Tuesday, he said Khan “had no other option but to run away.” Short, blunt, calibrated for maximum effect.
Adhikari knows the terrain. Falta sits inside the Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency, the seat that TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee has treated as his personal fortress. After the repoll was announced, Abhishek had come out swinging, daring Delhi to send its best to Falta and challenging the BJP head-on. The Trinamool bravado was loud.
Now their candidate is gone, the party is calling it personal, and Adhikari is standing in the constituency with a roadshow. The optics belong entirely to the BJP going into Thursday.
Who Is Left in the Race
With Khan having stepped aside, whether or not that step is legally valid, the field now looks like this: Debangshu Panda for the BJP, Abdur Razzak Molla from Congress, and Sambhu Nath Kurmi of the CPI(M). If Khan’s name still appears on the ballot, it adds a wild card to the vote count, though without active campaigning from either Khan or the TMC, the real contest is between the remaining candidates.
For the BJP, this is almost a gift. A repoll ordered because of proven irregularities, a sitting Chief Minister campaigning in the constituency, and the TMC’s candidate having publicly cited their CM’s development package on his way out. In electoral messaging terms, it does not get cleaner than this.
The Larger Picture in Bengal
There is something worth pausing on in what is happening in Falta right now. The 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections have already produced a result that reshaped the state’s political landscape, with the BJP coming to power after years of TMC dominance. That shift has consequences that are playing out at the ground level across constituencies, and Falta may be one of the sharper examples.
Whether what is happening to TMC’s structures in Falta is BJP pressure, a genuine breakdown of local organisation after the election loss, or something more complicated involving Khan’s personal calculation under legal heat, the picture that emerges is of a party managing its own fractures in public.
The booths open Thursday at 7 am. The votes count on May 24. Whatever Falta’s voters decide, they will decide it without Jahangir Khan actively asking for their support. The man who called himself Pushpa, it turns out, stepped away before the fight.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
Arun Upadhayay