1983 World Cup winner Kirti Azad on his Lok Sabha seat win: There you are playing for country, here you are playing for your party

A day after defeating BJP heavyweight Dilip Ghosh by a margin of 1.38 lakh votes in Bardhaman–Durgapur, 1983 World Cup winner Kirti Azad — representing the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) — said that him being a World Cup winner does strike a chord with the voters though the famous win at Lord’s came over 40 years ago.

“There is a resonance because of being part of the World Cup squad. It was the first time an Indian team had won a cricket World Cup and people do keep that in mind. There you played for the country, here you are playing for your party and playing for your manifesto,” Azad told The Indian Express.

Another former India cricketer Yusuf Pathan, also representing TMC, also turned out to be a giant-killer in West Bengal defeating Congress veteran Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury for the Baharampur seat.

The TMC won 29 of the 42 seats in West Bengal because of the promises fulfilled by chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Azad said.
“Whatever Didi promised, she has delivered. The way the government has worked in Bengal… from the birth of a child to the death of a man, there is something for the poor, whereas it was empty rhetoric from the BJP and the prime minister,” Azad said.

Ghosh is a former state BJP chief. He had won the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Medinipur.

Bardhaman–Durgapur, as a Lok Sabha constituency, came into existence in 2009 after a delimitation exercise and in 2019 the seat was won by BJP’s SS Ahluwalia. The TMC won the seat in 2014, while it had gone to the CPI(M) in 2009.

Talking about issues on which the election was fought in Bardhaman–Durgapur, Azad said: “Basically, these are central government issues related to PSUs. Many of them have shut down and the incumbent SS Ahluwalia had promised things but never fulfilled them. So there were problems galore. People are very angry with that. The larger message to the BJP is that false promises will not work here,” Azad said.

Azad, now a four-time MP, had won from Darbhanga three times on a BJP ticket, with back-to-back wins in 2009 and 2014. He then moved to the Congress. Azad failed to win from Dhanbad in 2019 on a Congress ticket. He joined the TMC in 2021.

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