After her own candidate backed out of the Nandigram bypoll, Mamata Banerjee said on Friday that her faction of the Trinamool Congress will now back the Congress nominee. She also noted she has the Congress's support in the fight to claim the name and symbol of the party she founded in 1998: "Rahul Gandhi called me yesterday.

We are together. We will not surrender to the BJP." She said the bypoll wasn't discussed on that call: "I had it in my mind, though I didn't tell them about the support in Nandigram."

Her faction had announced Sanchita Pradhan Dey as the candidate on Sunday; on Thursday night, Dey is learnt to have met Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, and on Friday it was revealed that Dey was withdrawing from the contest.

The nominations have already ended for the October 6 contest, so there's no time for a replacement.

"We had decided earlier; we have given our support to the Congress in Nandigram," she announced at a press conference where she lambasted the state and Centre's ruling BJP, Suvendu Adhikari, and the Election Commission of India.

Sanchita Dey's candidature was announced after much speculation that Mamata Banerjee would herself contest the Nandigram bypoll to enter the assembly and fight the TMC factionalism head-on.

There were also reports that she was open to an alliance with the Congress for the bypolls in Nandigram and Rejinagar. The Nandigram bypoll was necessitated by Adhikari's vacating of one of the two seats he won, as he retained Bhabanipur where he defeated Mamata Banerjee in the polls earlier this year.

Instead, Mamata chose Dey, a teacher who had lost her job following the cancellation of the appointments of 26,000 teachers in connection with the alleged recruitment scam.

She was a rather low-profile pick for a seat that has been a major battleground where Mamata Banerjee lost to aide-turned-enemy Suvendu Adhikari in 2021. She had then entered the assembly via a bypoll in Bhabanipur, a seat she lost this time to Adhikari.