Can TMC snatch Baharampur from Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury?

TMC candidate Yousuf Pathan and Congress candidate Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury

The Trinamool Congress in the Baharampur (Behrampur earlier) constituency in West Bengal has a special contestant - the five-time MP and current Congress candidate, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, whose winning streak extends from 1999. Such a streak for a Congressman is rare these days. The TMC is going all out to wrest his pocket borough and chose the cricketing star Yousuf Pathan as its candidate.

Pathan (41), a member of the 2007 T20 World Cup and 2011 Cricket World Cup winning teams, connects to Bengal with his tenure in the IPL team of Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) for six years (2011-17). The other benefit of his candidature being the fact that Baharampur constituency electorate comprises over 50 per cent of voters from the Muslim community. A high voltage campaign by TMC bigwigs, and a ruthless one at that, is being carried out to defeat Mamata Didi's bete noire.

Even his brother Irfan Pathan held a roadshow for Yousuf. To queries of him being an outsider, Pathan, born in Vadodara, says that while Gujarat is his ‘janmabhumi’ (birthplace), Bengal is his ‘karmabhumi’ (workplace). He has also used the popular TMC slogan ‘Khela hobe’.

The problem for the TMC is that it is not seen as fighting as part of the INDIA group. In a national election that is centred around BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, being part of a national coalition has immense advantages. The TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata’s nephew, blames Chowdhury for the failure of talks with the Congress on an alliance.

The TMC insists on telling the voters that it is very much a part of the INDIA group despite fighting Congress and Left in Bengal. That is a fine balancing act that needs to be performed in full public glare.

But what created a commotion during the TMC campaign was the circulation of a fake video of Chowdhury saying it was better to vote for the BJP than for the TMC.

The attempt was to undercut Chowdhury’s base among Muslims in the constituency; and by the time the ‘speech’ was shown up as a fake, it needed quite an effort to undo the damage.

Through all this, the BJP appears an onlooker who is watching the election scene in the hope that its main rivals will cancel out each other.

Chowdhury, the Congress floor leader in the Lok Sabha and Congress PCC president, who is looking forward to a double hat-trick, is as much critical of the Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, as she is of him. They blame each other for the failure of seat sharing talks in the INDIA bloc. They also term each other as being the B-team of the BJP.

The BJP is represented by Nirmal Chandra Saha, a surgeon by profession. He is banking on the Modi effect to garner votes. It is noteworthy that the Baharampur Assembly constituency was won by the BJP.

Baharampur constituency in Murshidabad district, has seen only 5 MPs since it was established in 1951. It was mostly with the left parties (except 1984 - INC) which took this constituency, until Chowdhury won it in 1999. Tridib Choudhari of Socialist Revolutionary Party (RSP) won the seat seven times, a record Choudhary wishes to break.

TMC had been unable to snatch this citadel from Chowdhury, like the party did with the left bastions. This election, the party is going all out to achieve this, to the point their campaign is now very ugly.