Kolkata: The Nandigram Assembly seat had hogged all the limelight as it witnessed a signature contest between Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee and her one-time man friday-now turned opposition Suvendu Adhikari. Most had billed it as an epic sort of a poll battle.
But, under the glitz of the Nandigram lies another seat that had actually scripted Mamata Banerjee's ascendency to Bengal's hustings. Tucked in the South Kolkata Lok Sabha constituency is the Bhabanipore Assembly seat, which has witnessed the victory of Mamata Banerjee as an MLA. Bhabanipore Assembly constituency goes to polls on Monday in the seventh phase of polls in West Bengal.
So, how is Mamata or to be more precise, the Trinamool Congress, faring from this seat which has given the chief minister of the state for two consecutive terms?
In 2011, when Mamata decimated the Left Front and took over the reigns of the state, she had won by a massive margin of 49, 936 votes from Bhabanipore. The seat had witnessed a smart voter turnout of around 63.78 percent. Mamata's margin of victory was as high as 21.91 percent. It could not get better than this. Mamata was literally on cloud nine.
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Then came the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and in three years, Trinamool witnessed a nosedive in its popularity from the Bhabanipore Assembly segment. Though Subrata Bakshi, the Trinamool candidate from the seat, beat BJP's Tathagata Roy by 1,36,000 votes, he trailed from Bhabanipore by 185 votes. Mamata knew something was not in sync from the very seat, which had not opened its coffers for her barely three years ago, but it is also the seat wherein she resides. Kolkata Municipal Corporation's Ward 73 also includes the address of Harish Chatterjee Street, Mamata's residence.
Introspection and course correction was done and Mamata Banerjee went to the Assembly polls in 2016 as a candidate from Bhabanipore. That year the seat witnessed a fight between Didi (Mamata is fondly called the elder sister) and Boudi (sister-in-law), Deepa Dasmunshi, the Congress candidate and wife of former union minister and Congress heavyweight Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi.
The mood was quite charged up with the Left Front and the Congress going to the polls as allies and both Rahul Gandhi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee throwing in their weight for Deepa, who was also a former union minister. The results came and Mamata, yet again, had the last laugh. But, there was a dark side to that smile. Mamata's winning margin was nearly slashed by half from what she got in 2011. With a 66.83 percent voter turnout, Mamata Banerjee won by 25,301 votes, with a victory margin of 10.21 percent. The rug was firmly pulled from under Mamata's feet by Chandra Kumar Bose, the BJP candidate, who had bagged 26,299 votes or 19.13 percent of votes.
A literal cosmopolitan constituency, Bhabanipore is one such seat, where Gujarati, Marwari and Sikh communities have a very strong presence and Bengalis are a borderline minority. The municipal wards of 63, 70, 72 and 74 of the Assembly segment are today considered as BJP backyards.
This time, though Mamata is not the candidate from Bhabanipore, she has nominated one of her old guards in the party Shovandeb Chattopadhyay from the seat. Shovandeb has been a sitting MLA from the neighbouring Rashbehari seat and is a cabinet member. He is pitted against actor-turned-politician Rudranil Ghosh of the BJP. The same Rudranil, who till middle of last year was a Trinamool Congress man.
In the last Lok Sabha polls of 2019, though Trinamool Congress managed a lead from the Bhabanipore Assembly segment by 3,168 votes, the party lost Ward number 73 to BJP by 496 votes. The same ward, which houses Mamata's residence.
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Bhabanipore Assembly constituency is a prestige fight for the saffron brigade in Bengal as it is the seat that houses the birthplace of Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. The seat also houses the birthplaces of luminaries like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Satyajit Ray. Though the seat has lost some sheen this year with Mamata Banerjee shifting to Nandigram, yet Bhabanipore still holds the keys to the prestige fight between Mamata and her bete-noire, the BJP in Kolkata.
The Trinamool supremo knows the contest has only got tough since the spectacular days of 2011. Can BJP turn tides this time or will Mamata keep her smile intact from Bhabanipore? May 2 will have the answer.
