Shahnawaz Ali Raihan: Student Activist To Academic To TMC Malda South Candidate (Image: flickr.com/photos/madhabbarman)When Trinamool Congress announced its candidates for the upcoming general elections, friends of Shahnawaz Ali Raihan was left wondering: Is this our Shahnawaz Ali Raihan who has been nominated as the TMC candidate for Malda Dakshin (Malda South)?. Replies to some phone calls and WhatsApp messages brought them the good news: It is their friend who was once a famous student activist in Delhi and then went on to become part of the prestigious Oxford University. Hailing from West Bengal, his is among other names including Yusuf Pathan, Abhishek Banerjee, Saugata Roy, Kirti Azad and Shatrughan Sinha, who have been nominated by the Mamata Banerjee-led party as candidates for the Lok Sabha elections due in April and May.
According to people who are friends of Shahnawaz Ali Raihan, the West Bengal-based party was in touch with Mr Raihan to take an electoral plunge for the last two years. Shahnawaz Ali Raihan, a notable voice from the UK academic circle, who has been making significant academic and public interferences regarding many of the political issues in India, including of the migration and other anti-people issues by the government. Malda-born Raihan is also a regular contributor to mainstream Bengali publications.
“A Personal Call To Protect Peaceful Malda From Communal Forces”: Shahnawaz Ali Raihan
A historian, he is working under Professor Faisal Devji for his DPhil in St Antony’s College of Oxford University on the topic “Between Marx and Muhammad: Muslims and Communism in Bengal”, and expected to submit his theses by this year. Before joining Oxforad as a Doctoral student, Mr Raihan was a student at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia and University of Calcutta. He was also associated with Al-Akhawayn University (Morocco) as a lecturer.
TMC list features another academic, Prof Saugata Roy, who has been the Member of Parliament of the party from Dum Dum from 2009. Before this in 2014, TMC had fielded another historian from Harvard University, Sugata Bose, whose fields of study are South Asian and Indian Ocean history and taught at Tufts University until 2001, when he accepted the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.
A Congress pocket borough, Malda South is currently represented by former Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury and he has been winning Lok Sabha constituency since 2009.
In the last elections Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury defeated BJP candidates Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury with a margin of 8,222 votes. Trinamool’s Md Moazzem Hossain came third. This time as well, BJP has fielded Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury, and Congress is yet to announce its candidate.