Kolkata: Former Team India captain Sourav Ganguly, popularly referred to as ‘Dada’, denied on Saturday that he “batted” for Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee, called ‘Didi’ by her supporters, and approached former teammate Yusuf Pathan to give up his MP seat for her.
In a signed statement, he rejected as untrue a report that claimed he had acted as an emissary for the party to ask the Baharampur MP to vacate his Lok Sabha seat so Mamata could contest a by-election from the constituency.
In the statement dated June 6 and addressed to “all the media houses”, Sourav said the allegations, “in so far as they concern me, are in reckless disregard of the truth”. He was referring to a front-page report in a popular Bengali daily on June 4 about ‘Mamata heading to Delhi for direct fight’.
Sourav, who has rejected several offers in the past to enter politics, was approached to convey Mamata Banerjee’s message to Pathan, and that the latter had declined to resign for her, the report stated.
“I was never requested/asked by Ms Mamata Banerjee to convey any message from her to Mr Yusuf Pathan, whether to step down from his parliamentary seat, as alleged or otherwise or at all,” Sourav said in the statement.
“I never approached or contacted Mr Yusuf Pathan with any such or other request/message. As such, the question of Mr Yusuf Pathan responding in the manner as alleged in the article does not and cannot arise,” he added.
He had “never been involved in political matters at any stage with any one concerned”, and urged the media “not to fall prey to rumours and speculations without verifying the correctness of the facts printed and published”, Sourav said, as reported by Hindustan Times.
Neither Pathan nor the TMC leadership have issued any on-record response to the report.
Pathan, a member of India’s 2011 World Cup-winning squad, won the Baharampur Lok Sabha seat in the 2024 elections, defeating veteran Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by a significant 85,000 votes. He and Sourav were briefly teammates at the Kolkata Knight Riders, too, in the IPL.
This comes amidst speculation over how Mamata might return to electoral office after the TMC’s defeat in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, in which the party was restricted to 80 seats in the 294-member House and she lost her own seat in Bhabanipur to Suvendu Adhikari.
