WEST BENGAL

  Left Front’s Bypoll Campaign Surges Ahead

B Prasant  

THE election campaign of the West Bengal Left Front’s CPI(M) candidates for the Nabadwip Lok Sabha seat and the Vidyasagar assembly constituency has surged ahead of those of the opposition Trinamul Congress, the Pradesh Congress and the BJP.  In conducting the election campaign, the Left Front has attached importance to intense house-to-house campaign and to street corner meetings, which are suitably interspersed with focussed area-centred rallies and are supplemented by marches. 

DISCIPLINED CAMPAIGN

Right from the day the names of the Left Front’s CPI(M) candidates --- Anadi Sahoo for Vidyasagar and Alakesh Das for Nabadwip --- were announced, thousands of workers engaged themselves in a disciplined manner in the task of not only highlighting the principal points of election campaign against the anti-people outlook of the BJP-led NDA government, and for the positive achievements of the Left Front government, but also for putting up the profiles of the candidates before the electorate.

Leaflets published by the Bengal Left Front and signed, among others, by Jyoti Basu, Biman Basu, Anil Biswas and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya have been distributed in their lakhs.  Posters and banners have been put up.  Vivid and bright graffiti have started to decorate the somewhat drab walls of the different neighbourhoods, adding in the process a splash of welcome colour.

The township of Nabadwip in the Nadia district of  central Bengal, a couple of hundreds of kilometres from Kolkata, is an old but prosperous township, and the Nabadwip constituency comprises the semi-urban conurbations of Chakdaha, Haringhata, Ranaghat (east), Hanskhali, Ranaghat (west) and Santipur, apart from Nabadwip itself. Of these, the Left Front won the first four assembly seats in 2001, with the Pradesh Congress winning Ranaghat (west) and Santipur, and the Trinamul Congress, whose sitting MP’s death brought about the Lok Sabha byelection here, getting away only with Nabadwip.

The political ambience this time around in the Nabadwip Lok Sabha constituency felt different from that prevailing during either the 1999 Lok Sabha polls or the 2001 Vidhan Sabha elections.  The width and depth of popular support for the Left Front’s candidate, youth leader and school teacher, Alakesh Das of the CPI(M) was evident over large stretches of rural and urban areas. 

The grassroots level campaign work has brought in within its sweep virtually the entire spectrum of the society in the cities and villages.  The involvement of a number of young men and women in Das’s campaign is there for everyone to see.

The campaign of the Trinamul Congress candidate Abirmohan Das (who got badly mauled by the electorate of the Hanskhali constituency election back in 2001), and that the Pradesh Congress hopeful Rajani Dolui (who was an ardent follower of Mamata Banerjee’s ‘Panskura line’ of mayhem even a year or so back, is clearly directionless and lacklustre.  The fact that the Left Front has managed to register impressive wins in Nadia district in the recently concluded panchayat elections has surely made them and their patrons in the media more than nervous.

SOLID SUPPORT FOR THE LEFT

The Vidyasagar constituency in the heart of north-central Kolkata has been a communist bastion since the time of the first general elections held in the country way back in 1952. The area itself has a strong Left tradition that stretches well into the days of the freedom struggle where centres like the Vidyasagar College and the neighbourhood that surrounds it, saw the launch of great surging struggles as part of the Quit India movement, in particular.  The forces of right reaction have never been able to make much of a dent in this well-known Red stronghold.

Dominated by meandering lanes, bylanes, and by old ancestral homes of the Kolkata aristocracy or babus of yore, the constituency has a very mixed population profile. There are large numbers of men, women and children from Bihar and Orissa, living in harmony side–by-side with the Bengalis who can claim origin as either bangals (i e, displaced people from East Pakistan and Bangladesh) or as ghotis ( i e, people who have had their home and hearth in the city for centuries together). 

And they have voted solidly for the Left and communist candidates whether at the level of the Kolkata municipal corporation or the assembly, or the Lok Sabha. The CITU has a strong presence in the myriad of small production units of the locales (mostly small machine shops, tailoring and hosiery units, and book binding shops). The educational institutions of the constituency have SFI-dominated students unions as a general rule. The Vidyasagar constituency has a strong youth and women’s movement led in large measure by the DYFI and the AIDWA respectively.

The Left Front’s candidate, Anadi Sahoo, has been active in the students’ movement and currently heads the Sealdah east local committee of the CPI(M). The common refrain that meets the opulent and intemperate campaign of the opposition Pradesh Congress and the BJP is that their candidates are seen only for a short period prior to the day of voting whilst Anadi Sahoo and the party he represents remain deeply embedded in their daily struggles. 

The opposition is additionally handicapped by the fact that the Pradesh Congress candidate, Ms Mahua Mandal, is in fact Trinamul Congress MP, Ajit Panja’s daughter. What is more, the recent attempt by Ms Mamata Banerjee to repair bridges with Panja has started to send the wrong message to the local Congress leaders who now have second thoughts about the prospects of Panja’s return to the Congress fold. The ridiculous show the Trinamul Congress chief chose to put up on the issue of her possible re-induction into the central cabinet has not done the dwindling prospects of the virtually unknown BJP candidate, Asoke Sinha, any good.