Kolkata: “Do you know how much red they have used to paint their candidate’s name on the walls here? Red is ingrained in the minds of people in this constituency and you can try hard, but can hardly succeed in wiping off the Reds from here,” CPIM leader Srijan Bhattacharya said about one of his opponents, Sayoni Ghosh of Trinamool Congress.
Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency in the south of Kolkata has been a witness to changing hues, but had its fair share of Left candidates representing the seat. Electing parliamentarians who have made a mark in the political sphere has been the hallmark of Jadavpur for long.
From Indrajit Gupta to Somnath Chatterjee to Professor Malini Bhattacharya to Sujan Chakaborty, the Left had its hammer and sickle flying high from this seat, which has its even share of rural and urban population, spread across the Assembly segments of Baruipur Purba and Paschim, Sonarpur Uttar and Dakshin, Bhangar, Tollygunge and Jadavpur.
Then there were the anti-Lefts. Here also Jadavpur never disappointed. From giant killer Mamata Banerjee to Krishna Bose and Professor Sugata Bose or singer Kabir Suman to actor Mimi Chakraborty, the cast has always been a stellar one.
The Trinamool Congress first made inroads into Jadavpur as early as in 1998, when Krishna Bose won the seat. But, in 2004 the CPIM snatched away Jadavpur from Mamata’s kitty. The wait for the Trinamool supremo was not long.
In 2009, Mamata fielded singer Kabir Suman from Jadavpur and since then there has been no looking back. Trinamool has been winning the seat for three consecutive terms now, but interestingly, Mamata never repeated any candidate in Jadavpur, even though they had won the polls. Kabir Suman won in 2009 followed by Professor Sugata Bose in 2014 and popular screen diva Mimi Chakraborty in 2019 -- all won, but for only one term.
Trinamool Congress has been gaining strength in the Assembly segments that make up Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat since 2011, when Bengal witnessed the exit of the Left Front from the state’s hustings. In fact, the Assembly segment of Jadavpur stood as a testimony to what this seat used to be, for the Left.
The CPIM never lost any Assembly election in Jadavpur from 1967 to 2011 with former Chief Minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee representing the seat from 1987 to 2011, before he was defeated by TMC’s Manish Gupta.
Trinamool managed to flutter its flag in all Assembly segments in 2021, minus Bhangar. The Assembly segment, which gave a lead to the TMC in 2019, was snatched away by Indian Secular Front’s Nawshad Siddiqui in 2021.
This time, initial talks between the CPIM and ISF did take off over an adjustment of seats. Jadavpur and Diamond Harbour were the most-discussed constituencies, but talks failed and ISF decided to field candidates from both seats.
“It would have been better if there was a triangular contest, but it did not. We have successfully campaigned among everyone in Bhangar and we hope there will be less vote splits,” Srijan sounded hopeful. He is also among the few candidates of the Left, on whom the Red supporters are pinning their hopes on.
Pitted against Srijan, who has been the Bengal secretary of the Students’ Federation of India and is a member of the CPIM”s state committee, is actor-turned-politician Sayoni Ghosh. She is the fourth candidate that Mamata Banerjee has chosen in as many number of successive general election.
“I am more a politician now and less an actor,” says Sayoni, who is also the president of Trinamool Youth Congress. Her primary aim is to establish her image as a girl next door across Jadavpur. Rest, she leaves to the charisma of Mamata Banerjee and the development projects of the Trinamool Congress.
Any discussion on Jadavpur remains incomplete if the country’s premiere education institution, Jadavpur University is not included. Luminaries like educationist, India’s education minister and the university’s first Vice-Chancellor Triguna Sen, economists Amartya Sen or Sukhamoy Chakravarty, banker Arundhati Bhattacharya, litterateur Nabaneeta Dev Sen and many others, have been associated with this prestigious seat of learning. And so has been the campus politics.
Srijan Bhattacharya was a student of this university, as was his opponent from BJP, Anirban Gangopadhyay. Anirban is a man from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and apart from being a member of the BJP’s National Executive Committee, he is also the chairman of the New Delhi-based Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation. He has a PhD in education on Sri Aurobindo’s quest for a philosophy of national education, from Jadavpur University. Sayoni also enrolled in the Comparative Literature department of the University, but had to quit due to her acting assignments.
The University, which binds all three, has seen many ups and downs. So has Srijan. He had unsuccessfully contested from the Singur Assembly seat in the 2021 elections. But, this time it is his home turf. “I live here. My family has been here for long. People here know us.”
Ditto for Sayoni. She has already appeared before the Enforcement Department and was subjected to questioning for nearly 12 hours in connection with the SSC recruitment scam. “BJP tried the ED-route by implicating me with a false accusation, but failed. They will fail in the elections too,” a confident Sayoni, draped in a cotton sari, says.
Anirban, on the other hand, has always been a strong critic of what Jadavpur University students call ‘world view’. “There is a reason why saffron never found a foothold in Jadavpur. They tried their best to have ABVP’s presence felt in the campus, but failed. They keep trying, and students resist. Tunnel vision is simply not Jadavpur University’s palate and BJP never understood it,” says Srijan, who has been a student leader while studying History in the University. On this, his opponent Sayoni is also on the same page.
But, Sawkat Mollah, Trinamool’s vote manager in Bhangar, is cautious. He knows TMC’s strongman of the area Arabul Islam is behind bars in a post-poll violence case, and he is the person on whom the leadership is depending on this time.
“BJP had got nearly 25,000 votes from Bhangar Assembly segment in 2019, which went upto around 39,000 in 2021. We cannot be complacent. It is not only the ISF and the CPIM. Things can always spin out of hand if there is any slackness,” Mollah says.
The CPIM knows, unless the rural votes from the four Assembly segments of Sonarpur and Bauirpur as well as Bhangar, shift from Trinamool Congress to the Left and that too in significant numbers, sunshine times won’t arrive for the Left in Jadavpur.
For Trinamool, it is all about Mamata Banerjee’s charisma, the social sector policies of the government and the party’s ground-level organisational strength.
And, for the BJP, it like relying on the words of celebrated British banker-politician Baron Rothschild, who had said, “The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets.” The saffron party can only bank on the bleeding that happens in Jadavpur from the Trinamool Congress and the Left.
Jadavpur goes to the polls on June 1.
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