BJP strikes the corruption gong at TMC’s Kolkata bastions, CPM puts faith in mix of old and new

The TMC has been winning these four seats since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections – two years before it swept to power for the first time in Bengal – and is banking again on the Mamata Banerjee government’s welfare schemes, particularly Lakshmir Bhandar.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during a roadshow in Kolkata on Wednesday. (Express Photo)

The BJP campaign has revolved around allegations of corruption and minority appeasement against the Mamata Banerjee government, and comparing the same to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “guarantees”.

The CPI(M), which holds no Lok Sabha or Assembly seat in West Bengal, is hopeful of changing that, with some signs of a revival and its decision to promote young faces catching attention.

Kolkata Uttar

All the three main contenders in this seat – sitting TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay, the BJP’s Tapash Roy, and the Congress’s Pradip Bhattacharya – started their political careers in the Congress.

Bandyopadhyay, 75, followed Mamata Banerjee out of the Congress three years after she formed the TMC in 2001, and has been winning Kolkata Uttar seat, which has 14.4 lakh voters, since 2009. Roy left the Congress to join the TMC during the 2008-09 Singur-Nandigram land agitation led by Mamata that propelled her to power. A month ago, he jumped to the BJP, and is now its candidate from Kolkata Uttar. Bhattacharya stayed on in the Congress, and is now the joint candidate of the party and Left in the seat.

Holding a rally in Bowbazar, just a stone’s throw away from the BJP office in Kolkata Uttar, Mamata appealed for votes for Bandyopadhyay calling him “one of the TMC’s senior-most leaders”. Referring to Bandyopadhyay’s arrest in 2017 in the Rose Valley chit fund scam, she said: “Sudip da was unjustly imprisoned, so many bad things were said about him. But what was the outcome? He became an MP because of his popularity.”

Making an emotional appeal, Mamata added: “I don’t know whether Sudip da will run in the next elections, but I urge you to vote for him this time. He has fought for this land with love.”

Roy says Bandyopadhyay is not even his chief opponent this time. “My main rival is Pradip Bhattacharya. Sudip Bandyopadhyay never did anything for Kolkata Uttar in his 15 years as MP… People are disillusioned,” Roy says, adding that a section of the TMC rebels will also vote for him.

On May 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a roadshow in Kolkata Uttar, and the BJP believes it has given Roy a boost in the seat.

Bhattacharya, who has been an MP of both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, has focused his energies in Muslim-dominated areas of the constituency which, he says, have been ignored by Bandyopadhyay.

Since voting got over in their constituencies, both Congress state president Adhir Chowdhury and senior CPI(M) leaders Md Selim and Biman Basu have campaigned for Bhattacharya.

In 2019, the TMC’s Bandyopadhyay had won with 49.96% of the votes, finishing 1.27 lakh votes ahead of the BJP’s Rahul Sinha, who got 35.59% of the votes. CPI(M) candidate Kaninika Ghosh got only 7.48% of the votes.

Kolkata Dakshin

With an electorate of 17 lakh, Kolkata Dakshin is known as the TMC’s strongest seat in West Bengal, held by Mamata herself from 1991 to 2011 and, since she moved to the Assembly and became the Chief Minister, retained by the party.

In the 2011 bypoll held after Mamata vacated the seat, Kolkata Dakshin, where minorities comprise an estimated 22% of the voters, was won by her trusted lieutenant Subrata Bakshi. He was the MP till 2019, when the TMC replaced him with Mala Roy, who won by a margin of 1.55 lakh votes.

Roy got 47.5% of the votes against 34.64% for Chandra Kumar Bose of the BJP. The CPI(M)’s Nandini Mukherjee was a distant third with 11.63% of the votes.

This time, all the three main candidates are women. Apart from Roy, 66, of the TMC, there is the BJP’s Debasree Chowdhury, 53, and the CPI(M)’s Saira Shah Halim, 46.

After winning the Raiganj Lok Sabha seat in 2019, Chowdhury was inducted as Minister of State, External Affairs, at the Centre. Her main hope in the seat are the 20%-plus non-Bengali urban voters, who are seen as more inclined towards the BJP.

Chowdhury says the Kolkata Dakshin contest “is not a challenge at all”. “The Mamata of 1991, when she first won from this seat, is completely different from the Mamata of now… Bengal is now the hub of corruption,” she says.

Roy contests this, saying her door-to-door campaign shows “people are happy with the development in the constituency”. Her winning margin will go up to 3 lakh, she claims.

Halim, who contested a bypoll in 2021 and lost, is a distant relative of actor Naseeruddin Shah and seen as one of the fresh faces of the CPI(M). She is appealing to voters to choose “an educated, honest leader, who has stood by the disenfranchised, youth, minority and disempowered”.

“I have been a vocal critic of the current fascist regime on all platforms – be it television debates, on the ground, CAA-NRC protest sites… I don’t want to comment on the other candidates… but TMC MPs staged a walkout in Parliament when the CAA was being passed,” she says.

Dum Dum

Mamata has stuck with Saugata Roy as the TMC candidate from the constituency, which has an electorate of 15.6 lakh, overruling strong dissent by a section of the party over the fact that he is 77. Before the Lok Sabha elections, the party saw a rift within the ranks over the issue of age, with a lobby seen as led by TMC No. 2 Abhishek Banerjee pushing for new faces as candidates.

Saugata Roy has been the Dum Dum MP since 2009, and is pitted against fellow veterans – the CPI(M)’s Sujan Chakraborty, 65, and the BJP’s Shilbhadra Dutta, 62. Both the CPI(M) and BJP have changed their candidates from last time, Nepaldev Bhattacharya and Samik Bhattacharya, respectively.

Roy dismisses Chakraborty as a TV face, and says the talk that he has gained ground is a “media creation”. “In 2014, the CPI(M) got 29% of the votes and the BJP 22%. The CPI(M) candidate lost by more than a lakh votes. In 2019, the BJP’s vote share went up to 30%, while the CPI(M)’s went down to 13%… How can the CPI(M) go up from 13% to 42% (the votes Roy got in 2019)? Is there any political magic?”

Chakraborty, who won the Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat in 2014, and has been a two-time MLA, argues that “the TMC-BJP binary since the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is broken”. “People have realised that the TMC is not the actual alternative to the BJP, and neither is the BJP the real Opposition. Vote percentages of both the TMC and BJP will come down in this election, and only the CPI(M)’s will increase.”

BJP candidate Shilbhadra Dutta won the Barrackpore Assembly seat on the TMC ticket in 2016. In 2021, he joined the BJP but lost the election from Barrackpore.

Jadavpur

In this seat of 18 lakh electors, known for its university, both the CPI(M) and BJP have put up relatively young leaders, Srijan Bhattacharya, and Anirban Ganguly, respectively, against the TMC’s Sayani Ghosh, who is herself just 31.

In 2019, the TMC’s Mimi Chakraborty had won Jadavpur with 47.91% of the votes and a massive margin of 2.95 lakh votes. The vote share of the BJP was slightly more than the CPI(M)’s – at 27.36% for Anupam Hazra, against 21.04% for Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya.

Crisscrossing the streets of Jadavpur, Ghosh, 31, says: “In 2021 (Assembly polls), the TMC fought on the slogan ‘Bangla nijer meye ke chaye (Bengal wants its own daughter)’, and Didi (Mamata Banerjee) told me that the daughter of Jadavpur must return to Jadavpur this time. This is a prestigious seat and the bigger the challenge, the better,” says the Jadavpur native.

Ghosh, who contested from Asansol Dakshin Assembly seat in 2021 but lost, says that despite her active acting career, she is “not an armchair politician”. “In the last three years, I worked in three films and addressed 300 sabhas.”

The BJP’s Ganguly, 47, accuses the TMC of not developing the Jadavpur Lok Sabha “to its potential”. “For years, people have been demanding the expansion of the Metro to Baruipur and Sunarapur. There is an acute water problem. The Jal Jeevan Mission has been deliberately delayed (the Centre accuses the Mamata government of going slow on this scheme). In certain pockets, Rohingya have been settled illegally,” says Ganguly, who contested the Assembly elections from Bolpur in 2021 but lost.

The CPI(M)’s 34-year-old Srijan Bhattacharya, who contested from Singur in the 2021 Assembly polls and lost, says the party “is not playing on the ground of the BJP and TMC”.

“We are setting our own narrative. We are talking about issues deliberately avoided by the TMC and BJP… the increasing fares of electricity, medicines, petrol, diesel, how the education system has been ruined in the last 10 years. People are receptive to what we are saying,” Srijan says.