Nandini Mukherjee at JU on Thursday. Picture by Amit Datta

Calcutta, Sept. 1: The CPM has decided to field Jadavpur University professor Nandini Mukherjee against Mamata Banerjee for the September 25 bypoll in Bhowanipore.

Golf Garden resident Mukherjee, 45, is the director of the university’s School of Mobile Computing and Communication. This will be her first foray into electoral politics.

“Nandini Mukherjee is our Left Front-backed CPM candidate for the Bhowanipore Assembly seat,” CPM state secretariat member Rabin Deb said tonight. He said the state secretariat, the party’s highest decision-making body at the state level, met today to clear Mukherjee’s name.

“Mukherjee was chosen because of her long association with the pro-Left teachers’ movement,” Deb added.

A member of the CPM’s Calcutta district committee, however, said Mukherjee was chosen because no heavyweight leader wanted to contest against Mamata.

“For over a week we had been scouting for a candidate to contest against Mamata in her Bhowanipore bastion. But no heavyweight leader agreed. As a last resort, we have picked Mukherjee to take on the chief minister,” the Calcutta district committee member said.

In this year’s Assembly polls, the CPM’s Narayan Jain had lost to Trinamul’s Subrata Bakshi from Bhowanipore by a margin of 49,983 votes.

Mukherjee skirted the question why she decided to contest a seat from where chances of her victory were remote. “I have no choice since the party has selected me,” she said.

A Jadavpur “connection” binds Mamata and Mukherjee. If Mukherjee works for the varsity named after the place, it was from there that a young Mamata had stormed her way into electoral politics by defeating Somnath Chatterjee, then with the CPM and considered a heavyweight candidate, in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls.

The bypoll result will be declared on September 28.

The professor said she had been associated with the pro-Left Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association since 1992. A former SFI activist, Mukherjee did her postgraduation in computer science and engineering from JU in 1991 after passing out of the erstwhile Shibpur B.E. College (now called Bengal Engineering and Science University) in 1987. She did her PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, in 1999.

Jain, who had lost to Bakshi and resigned from the CPM after that, said a “nervous” party leadership had requested him to campaign for Mukherjee. “Immediately after Mukherjee was chosen, Rabin Deb called me up and requested me to campaign for her. Such a move betrays the CPM’s nervousness. The party knows it will lose the bypoll. I have already resigned from the party and requested Mamatadi to allow me to campaign for her,” Jain said.

He said the CPM was targeting the “non-Bengali vote bank” by requesting him to campaign for Mukherjee.

The Bhowanipore seat fell vacant after PWD minister Bakshi stepped down as an MLA to clear the decks for Mamata to contest the seat.

The CPM has chosen Subid Ali Gazi, 64, as the party candidate for the bypoll to the Basirhat North Assembly seat that fell vacant after Mostafa bin Quasem’s death. Gazi is a North 24-Parganas district committee member of the CPM.

Trinamul is yet to decide on its candidate for the seat. “We are not going to renominate Sardar Amjad Ali. He had lost to the CPM’s Quasem by a margin of 3,943 votes. We plan to field a new candidate and will finalise the name in a day or two,” a Trinamul general secretary said.

A Trinamul leader said A.T.M. Abdullah, who defected to the party from the Congress recently, could be fielded. Abdullah said his name had been “sent to Mamatadi”.