Corporate honcho lost in political jungle

Disillusioned by the month-long experience in the murky world of politics, Madhumanti Sengupta now curses herself for having bitten the bait.

Madhumanti Sengupta

Madhumanti Sengupta, a top executive of Siemens Public Communications Networks, woke up one morning nine weeks ago at her plush Greater Kailash flat in Delhi to find a politician at her doorstep.

He (she won’t reveal his name) offered her the Nationalist Congress Party ticket from Midnapore. She accepted, gave up her job as Vice-President (Account Management, South Asia) that used to pay her Rs 60 lakh a year, flew down to this violence-prone district and parked herself in a political minefield.

Today, she’s totally at sea. Disillusioned by the month-long experience in the murky world of politics, she now curses herself for having bitten the bait. A graduate in Economics from Jadavpur University, the middle-aged and svelte lady also holds a management degree, a diploma in computer science and is now studying law. She’s also an accomplished dancer, but she rues it’s now her party workers who’re making her go round in circles.

“I don’t know what to do. There’s nobody to guide me. Many of these people (the workers) take money from me and just disappear,” she complains.

Madhumanti comes across as naïve — she says she doesn’t have a clue if NCP president Sharad Pawar has the foggiest idea who his party’s candidate from Midnapore is. She parrots the line most political novices do — “I want to dedicate myself to the development of Midnapore” — and is apparently in the process of going bankrupt in that noble endeavour. According to her, she hasn’t got a single penny from her party for campaigning and has been delving into her own accounts.

Her ties with Midnapore are, at best, tenuous: she claims her father (Kshiti Prasanna Sengupta) hailed from this district and, as a freedom fighter, spent many years behind bars at the Midnapore Jail. Her campaign posters declare she’s the niece of Dinesh Gupta, a martyr in the freedom struggle.

Admittedly, she has plans for Midnapore. She tells the handful who bother to listen to her that she wants to act as a catalyst for establishing job-oriented industries in this district. Ask her to be specific, and she says it’s the biotechnology and IT sectors she’s talking about. All this will supposedly be done from the MP Local Area Development funds.

But Madhumanti has little idea of the Assembly segments that make up her constituency, neither has she any idea of her campaign schedule or the issues that dog Midnapore. She shies away from speaking about her rivals — CPI’s Prabodh Panda (the two-time MP from here) and BJP’s Rahul Sinha. She waxes eloquent on teamwork, but hasn’t managed to string together any team of her own.

Her rivals, expectedly, ignore her. Local leaders — and there isn’t any from the NCP here — say she doesn’t stand a chance. At best, Madumanti, with her striking good looks, evokes some degree of curiosity.

Whether she wins or loses is another matter, but the affable and impeccable Madhumanti has realised that there’s a wide, perhaps unbridgeable, gulf between the corporate jungle and the cesspool of politics. Some people learn the hard way.