West Bengal Lok Sabha election: 'Bihari Babu' vs son of the soil lock horns in Asansol

After Babul Supriyo vacated the seat, ShatrughanSinha was nominated by Trinamool to garner the Bihari votes.

What matters more: having a representative who is from your area or one who symbolises your struggles and interests? A ‘local’ leader or a charismatic outsider?

With around 50 per cent non-Bengalis, most of whom are Biharis, it has been a strategic decision of the Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee to field actor Shatrughan Sinha aka ‘Bihari Babu’ from Asansol Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal, bordering Jharkhand, in 2022 by-election and again now. However, to amplify the outsider tag and minimise the impact of the star value of Sinha, BJP has nominated a veteran politician and ‘son of the soil’ Surendrajeet Singh Ahluwalia, locally addressed as ‘Sardarji’.

The constituency, comprising the second largest city of Asansol, after the state capital Kolkata, is an industrial belt lined by coal mines. Dominated by factory workers, coal miners and scrap dealers coming from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the electorate, in recent years, is favourable to the BJP, returning Babul Supriyo to the Parliament twice. After Babul Supriyo, also a playback singer and actor, vacated the seat, Sinha was nominated by TMC to garner the Bihari votes. Sinha was also part of the cast in the cult Hindi film Kala Pathar (1979) portraying the 1975 Chasnala coal mine tragedy (near Dhanbad), where his character is one of the miners who dies. In the 2022 by-election Sinha won the seat by 3,03,209 votes.

Ahluwalia on the other hand was born and brought up in Asansol. He replaced the Bhojpuri actor-singer Pawan Singh, who came under criticism following misogynistic posts against Bengali women, as the BJP candidate. However, TMC is aggressively campaigning that Ahluwalia does not return much to the constituencies after winning them. In 2014, BJP fielded him from Darjeeling and in 2019 from Bardhaman-Durgapur (now Dilip Ghosh). Ahluwalia, who was also a Rajya Sabha MP and former Union Minister of State, on the other hand, is basing his campaign on ideology - “by bringing back Sanatan dharm”. The BJP is also depending on his experience as a Parliamentarian for 30 years.

But there are issues troubling the electorate for long, and, whoever be the MP, problems are not resolved. Scarcity of drinking water is a big issue, despite the ‘har Ghar jal’ project, especially in tribal and rural areas. Factories have been closed for years, causing unemployment and forcing workers to look for labour outside the state. Illegal mining at abandoned collieries and illegal sand mining in Damodar river banks are cause for concern. There is a lot of anger as the issues remain unresolved and the successive MPs do not take the issues to the Parliament.

The CPI(M) has propped its two-time Jamuria MLA, Jahanara Khan as its candidate. Khan comes from a predominantly tribal belt. CPI(M) had a sustained hold on Asansol constituency till 2011, when TMC began neutralising its influence. With BJP making inroads into Bengal, those opposed to TMC are relying more on BJP, rather than CPI(M). This was when Mamata brought in Sinha to reduce the BJP’s vote share. The strategy worked in the bye-election, and while a repeat in the general election is slightly more difficult, it is still very much in the realm of possibility.