By Sujit Bhar
In journalistic parlance, if West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wins the Bhawanipore (or Bhabanipur) Assembly seat in Kolkata, yet again – remember, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay has vacated this seat – it may not classify as news. Her popularity in this area of the city of Kolkata is so intense that she might as well sleep through it all. She won’t of course, and the fact that the Election Commission of India has relented to hold bye-election in this and a few more seats of the state on September 30, points to the growing clout of the leader.
Under Article 164 (4) of the Constitution, a minister or a chief minister will cease to be a minister if he/she is not a member of the assembly for a period of six consecutive months. After the assembly election results were declared and the EC had finally declared that Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and TMC turncoat Suvendu Adhikari had won over Mamata Banerjee from the Nandigram seat by a margin of 1,956 votes, she was to have become an elected representative of the people by November 5 to retain her post.
There existed other options, of course, such as being inducted into the Legislative Council that Mamata has proposed to bring back to the state. But the vacating of the Bhabanipur seat by Sovandeb Chattopadhyay was the easiest way out. Bypolls will be held at two other constituencies as well: Jangipur and Samserganj. The results are scheduled to be declared on October 3.
During the last elections there, in the seventh phase of polling on April 26, electricity minister Sovandeb Chattopadhyay was up against a small-time Bengali movie actor Rudranil Ghosh of the BJP. Sovandeb won hands down over the pretentious Ghosh. Meanwhile, at Nandigram, the temperature had risen to boiling point. The Election Commission had clearly played its partisan part – as if scheduling the voting in 292 of the 294 constituencies in the state in a record eight phases, between March 27 to April 29, 2021 wasn’t enough of a show of blatant bias – by initially declaring Mamata as the winner from the seat, then cancelling that announcement and, hours later, declaring that Suvendu had won.
The most disgraceful act of the Election Commission was allowing the election to drag on within a pandemic and even allowing major rallies. Immediately after the elections, though, it supposedly realised that holding bye-elections in a pandemic may be dangerous and dithered, putting Mamata’s re-election at risk. Immense pressure was put on the EC and it finally relented.
It also took a request from the Chief Secretary of the state, who assured the Commission that Covid-19 is fully under control in the state. The official also insisted that since the Chief Minister was not a member of the assembly, bye-elections should be held immediately to avoid any constitutional crisis and ‘vacuum in the top executive posts in the government’.
State minister and Trinamool Congress leader Firhad Hakim has tweeted:
“My leader (Mamata Banerjee) has been the MLA of Bhawanipur twice earlier. This time she is again going to be the MLA of this area! In the excitement of the run-up to the elections, we stepped out on the streets painting walls in our locality to show our support. #AbarKhelaHobe.”
But khela should be a walkover. There is resentment within the Bhabanipur area regarding the economic failures of the TMC, but the general tendency of the Bengali bhadralok of making a paan or even a pun out of the pain, has resulted in a somewhat resigned attitude that will never create hurdles.
Now, over to the actual scenario. BJP really does not have a whisper of a chance in this assembly seat. However, while Mamata’s popularity is at its peak now, her nephew Abhishek Banerjee has yet to get the pulse of people of his own area. The massive properties that Abhishek has, with the help of muscle power, consumed from local land and house owners has left a really bad taste in the mouths of people who had earlier sworn by the name of Mamata. The ED’s calling up of Abhishek for the Saradha scam has not added to his unpopularity. Mamata’s fan-following, though, has not diminished – and with the TMC’s return to power with the massive victory, this has only been further cemented – but a total vacuum on the job front, as well as lower party contributions this year to puja organisers have not gone down well.
Just off Patua Para (the lane adjacent to Mamata’s Harish Chatterjee Street), and a stone’s throw from Abhishek’s new, flashy office on Harish Mukherjee Road, shop owners, vegetable and flower-sellers and even slum-dwellers agree in one voice that their lives and livelihoods have been going down the drain for a while. There are no jobs, existing small businesses are fast disappearing in the mire of politics and existence is difficult. On the other side of Kalighat Road, new apartment buildings and even a shiny new Gym caters to the people who the BJP derives support from.
Bhabanipur and Kalighat are old areas of the city, with old ideas, old paras and old people. Politics has always been a way of life with them, but now, when prices of essential items have shot through the roof and income has depleted, survival seems to have become more important than ideologies. That was one reason, in West Bengal, why pathetic borrowed ideologies of the Left Front were thrown out.
The BJP will lose in Bhabanipur this time. But in the long run, when bellies remain empty and doles peter down, there could be a different khela playing. It doesn’t matter if the Centre’s economic policies are disastrous. All that matters is putting food on the table for the family, and having a steady earning that can allow pride to be kept intact. Not this time, but Bhabanipur has started to rethink.