East Bardhaman: BJP candidate for Bardhaman-Durgapur constituency Dilip Ghosh campaigns at Suryanagar Malir Math ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in East Bardhaman, Wednesday, April 3, 2024. (Photo: PTI)
In the Bardhaman-Durgapur Lok Sabha constituency, a region known for shifting political allegiances with every election, BJP candidate Dilip Ghosh faces a crucial challenge to overturn this pattern and secure his political future.
Since its inception in 2009, Bardhaman-Durgapur has sent representatives of the CPI(M), TMC and BJP to the Lok Sabha once each in the three previous polls.
In 2019, the BJP’s SS Ahluwalia won the seat from the TMC by a narrow margin of around 3,000 votes, marking it as a challenging battleground for the saffron party.
With better odds, the BJP is confident that Ghosh, widely regarded as one of the most successful state presidents, will retain his position in the region.
Political analysts believe that Ghosh’s move from his previous constituency in Medinipur, coupled with his resignation from the post of the party’s national vice-president, has turned the Bardhaman-Durgapur fight into a critical test for both prestige and political survival for Ghosh.
“Dilip Ghosh is now fighting a battle for his political survival. He is currently cornered within his own party. A victory would revive his political career, while a defeat could raise doubts about it,” said Maidul Islam, a political scientist at the Centre. for studies in the social sciences.
During Ghosh’s tenure as state BJP president, the party won 18 Lok Sabha seats in 2019.
Despite the challenging circumstances, the BJP leader remains optimistic about his prospects.
“I am a loyal party member and I embrace whatever role is assigned to me. This is a challenge I am ready to overcome,” Ghosh told PTI.
Highlighting his record of political firsts, he added, “I became state president within nine months of joining the party. I became an MLA in my first attempt, by defeating 10-time MLA Gyan Singh Sohanpal “I also became a Member of Parliament in my first attempt. Bardhaman-Durgapur presents a new challenge for me.”
Ghosh’s opponents in this election race include TMC candidate and former Indian cricketer Kirti Azad, as well as LeftCongress alliance candidate Sukriti Ghoshal.
The TMC, which is keen to win back the seat, is facing the hurdle of Azad being labeled an “outsider” by the BJP.
Azad, however, dismissed these concerns, saying, “I am an Indian, and any Indian can contest from any part of the country. This election is about issues and policies, not about individuals.”
The BJP, on the other hand, has launched a campaign emphasizing Azad’s outsider status, echoing the ‘insider-outsider’ narrative used by the TMC during the 2021 Assembly elections.
The ‘insider-outsider’ debate in West Bengal gained momentum ahead of the 2021 state elections, with the ruling TMC tapping into Bengali subnationalism to counter the BJP’s Hindutva narrative.
The constituency, created following the reorganization of the parliamentary constituencies in 2008, is a mix of industrial and agricultural regions, attractive to both rural and urban voters. It includes seven assembly segments: Burdwan South, Burdwan North, Monteswar, Bhatar, Galsi, Durgapur East and Durgapur West.
In the 2021 Assembly elections, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) secured victories in all segments except Durgapur West.
The seats in this constituency were once bastions of the left-wing parties. However, the changing political tides in Bengal since the defeat of the Left Front government in 2011 have seen the TMC steadily gain ground in the area.
In 2009, Saidul Haque of the CPI(M) won the Lok Sabha seat by over one lakh votes against Congress-backed TMC candidate Nargis Begam. But in 2014, TMC’s Mamtaz Sanghamitra wrested Haque’s seat.
Five years later, the elections saw a close contest, with SS Ahluwalia of the BJP narrowly defeating the TMC by a margin of 0.1 percent of the votes, with the two parties securing 42.3 and 42.2 percent of the votes respectively.
The constituency has a Muslim population of almost 20 percent, while the Scheduled Caste community comprises 27 percent.
With the Left-Congress alliance entering the fray, the upcoming elections promise a three-way battle, a departure from the earlier bipolar battle.
“This area has a rich history of trade unions and peasant movements led by the left. The CPI(M) maintains its base here, as evidenced by the 2016 assembly elections, when the Left-Congress alliance won two factions,” Islam said.
In 2019, the CPI(M) polled over 1.5 lakh votes, accounting for 11.5 per cent of the total votes polled, while the Congress polled nearly 38,000 votes, constituting 2.3 per cent of the votes.
“With the Left-Congress alliance, we are optimistic about winning the seat. The electorate is disenchanted with both the TMC and the BJP,” Ghosal said.
Islam emphasized that if the Left-Congress alliance secures more than 15 percent of the votes polled, the election battle could go either way as far as the TMC and the BJP are concerned.
Sensing the looming danger from the Left Congress, Ghosh recently appealed to the Left voters to vote for the BJP in the fight against the ‘corrupt TMC’, a plea that was outright rejected by the CPI(M).
The Left-Congress alliance aims to resonate with the people on issues like unemployment and agrarian crisis, arising from state and central policies, as their key campaign issues in the constituency that will be voted on on May 13.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: April 27, 2024 | 10:54 am IST