Subscribe Now! Get features like
Yusuf Pathan made his name finishing innings — a slog-overs specialist for India and Kolkata Knight Riders who cleared the ropes when it mattered. Now the Trinamool Congress MP from Baharampur is at the centre of a very different contest, named by his own party’s leaders as a possible defector even as he has said nothing himself. His former captain has already drawn a distance, though.
Yusuf Pathan’s name surfaced as the TMC’s Lok Sabha unit split, with a rebel group led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar claiming to have “nearly 20 MPs” who would back the BJP-led NDA regime.
The first to call out the occasional off-spinner Pathan was the TMC’s Krishnanagar MP Mahua Moitra. “And [Yusuf Pathan] you are rushing to Delhi because [Union home minister and BJP leader Amit Shah] has called you?” she wrote on X.
“Have some courage. You played for India. Our district voted you in with a huge margin. Have some shame & some spine,” Moitra, known for her swashbuckling style too, told the ex-batter.
A day later the charge was repeated by Kalyan Banerjee, the TMC’s Lok Sabha chief whip appointed when Mamata Banerjee took the post away from Kakoli Ghosh amid churning that began after the TMC lost to the BJP in Bengal.
“I talked to Yusuf Pathan yesterday (June 8). He was in Baroda (Vadodara). He said Amit Shah has called him and he’s coming to Delhi to meet him,” Kalyan Banerjee told a press conference, calling the home minister “the person” working to break the TMC. He said the rebels “have changed their leader from Mamata Banerjee to Narendra Modi”.
Yusuf Pathan, Amit Shah, and Narendra Modi all happen to be Gujaratis. Pathan became MP in Bengal after Mamata personally picked him for the TMC ticket in 2024, reportedly owing to his being a Muslim and a larger-than-life cricket star.
Yusuf Pathan, whose brother Irfan has also been a Team India star, himself has stayed silent.
A BJP MLA in Bengal, Sharadwat Mukherjee, meanwhile said, “Pathan has run away and already gone to another club,” speaking in not-so-hard riddles.
Pathan reportedly reached Delhi on Monday afternoon with fellow MP Rachana Banerjee, but it was not clear which side he was on. He is not confirmed among the signatories to the rebels’ reported letter seeking separate seating in the Lok Sabha. Mamata Banerjee’s loyalist MP Kirti Azad insists only 13 MPs have actually signed, while a two-thirds rebellion, 19 of total 28 LS MPs, is needed for them to save their seats under the anti-defection law.
Days earlier, Pathan had figured in another related storyline. A front-page report in Bangla daily Anandabazar Patrika on June 4 said Mamata Banerjee — who lost her own assembly seat to now-CM Suvendu Adhikari in the April-May polls — wanted to enter the Lok Sabha through a by-election, and had sent word, via former India captain Sourav Ganguly, asking Pathan to vacate Baharampur for her. The report said Pathan declined.
Ganguly knocked that down flatly. In a signed statement to “all the media houses” dated June 6, he called the allegations, “in so far as they concern me… in reckless disregard of the truth”.
“I was never requested/asked by Ms Mamata Banerjee to convey any message from her to Mr Yusuf Pathan,” Ganguly said, adding, “I never approached or contacted Mr Yusuf Pathan with any such or other request/message.”
Pathan has gone from someone who could have vacated a seat for Mamata, to reportedly saying no, and now allegedly being lured away from her.
A member of India’s 2011 World Cup-winning squad who retired from all cricket in 2021, Yusuf Pathan, 43, won Baharampur in 2024 in one of that election’s marquee results, beating five-term Congress veteran Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by about 85,000 votes.
His position sits inside a wider collapse of Team Mamata, as TMC was once seen.
The rebel camp led by Barasat MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar says nearly 20 of the TMC’s 28 Lok Sabha members back the NDA and wants recognition as a separate bloc — needing 19 to clear the anti-defection bar. It follows a revolt in the Bengal assembly, where 58 of 80 TMC MLAs backed expelled leader Ritabrata Banerjee as Leader of the Opposition.
Aarish Chhabra is an Associate Editor with the Hindustan Times online team, writing news reports and explanatory articles, besides overseeing coverage for the website. His career spans nearly two decades across India's most respected newsrooms in print, digital, and broadcast. He has reported, written, and edited across formats — from breaking news and live election coverage, to analytical long-reads and cultural commentary — building a body of work that reflects both editorial rigour and a deep curiosity about the society he writes for. Aarish studied English literature, sociology and history, besides journalism, at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and started his career in that city, eventually moving to Delhi. He is also the author of ‘The Big Small Town: How Life Looks from Chandigarh’, a collection of critical essays originally serialised as a weekly column in the Hindustan Times, examining the culture and politics of a city that is far more than its famous architecture — and, in doing so, holding up a mirror to modern India. In stints at the BBC, The Indian Express, NDTV, and Jagran New Media, he worked across formats and languages; mainly English, also Hindi and Punjabi. He was part of the crack team for the BBC Explainer project replicated across the world by the broadcaster. At Jagran, he developed editorial guides and trained journalists on integrity and content quality. He has also worked at the intersection of journalism and education. At the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, he developed a website that simplified academic research in management. At Bennett University's Times School of Media in Noida, he taught students the craft of digital journalism: from newsgathering and writing, to social media strategy and video storytelling. Having moved from a small town to a bigger town to a mega city for education and work, his intellectual passions lie at the intersection of society, politics, and popular culture — a perspective that informs both his writing and his view of the world. When not working, he is constantly reading long-form journalism or watching brainrot content, sometimes both at the same time.
Leave a Reply