Sunday will bring down the curtains on one of the most fiercely fought elections in West Bengal, when the final nine seats of the state’s 42, will go to polls in the last phase of the ongoing general elections.
These seats are in Trinamool Congress’s heartland of Kolkata and its neighbouring districts of North 24-Parganas and South 24-Parganas. Of these, eight have been with the TMC since 2009. In 2014, Joynagar too went to TMC, led by the chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
The past week saw a high-pitched battle between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the TMC, during and in the immediate aftermath of BJP president Amit Shah’s roadshow in Kolkata, which included the vandalising of a bust of 19th century Bengali icon Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in an educational institute.
This led to the Election Commission bringing forward the campaign period by 19 hours, a move that received all-round criticism from Opposition leaders.
The previous phases also saw several incidents of violence, some of which caused deaths of party workers in both parties.
Heavyweights in phase 7 include chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, from Diamond Harbour, who will contest BJP’s Nilanjan Roy, who had switched from the Congress to the BJP last year. CPI(M)’s Fuad Halim, son of former Bengal Assembly speaker Hashim Abdul Halim, is the Left candidate.
{{/usCountry}}Heavyweights in phase 7 include chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, from Diamond Harbour, who will contest BJP’s Nilanjan Roy, who had switched from the Congress to the BJP last year. CPI(M)’s Fuad Halim, son of former Bengal Assembly speaker Hashim Abdul Halim, is the Left candidate.
{{/usCountry}}In Kolkata North, TMC’s incumbent Sudip Banerjee is pitted against BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha. Sudip Banerjee had spent 136 days behind the bars after the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested him in January 2017, in connection with the Rose Valley ponzi scam.
In Dumdum, TMC’s two-time MP Sougata Roy, who was one of the accused in the Narada sting of March 2016, is seeking re-election, while BJP’s state unit spokesperson and former MLA Shamik Bhattacharya will take him on. The CPI(M) has fielded veteran leader Nepaldeb Bhattacharya.
The high-profile Jadavpur constituency, too, is bracing for a triangular fight, with TMC fielding a political greenhorn, Bengali film industry actor Mimi Chakraborty, BJP nominating Anupam Hazra (TMC’s Bolpur MP who switched to BJP in March) and CPI(M) naming former Kolkata Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya. The Congress has supported Bhattacharya.
“Though this is TMC’s heartland, there is a wind of anti-incumbency and this is going to make TMC’s battle a real difficult one,” said political analyst Amal Mukhopadhyay, former principal of Presidency College.
To ensure peaceful and fair polling, the Election Commission has decided to deploy 770 companies of central forces. All the polling stations would be guarded by the central forces.
Kolkata South, Joynagar and Mathurapur — where both Modi and Mamata Banerjee held rallies last week — are TMC’s strongholds.