Shades of poll campaign in West Bengal: From song wars to celebrity fights

Music of Politics
Last Thursday, lakhs of people arrived in Shantiniketan town in West Bengal to celebrate Holi. There was music and dance set to the tunes of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs. Traffic jams and short supplies at restaurants followed. Amidst this chaos, Sajal Biswas, a tuba bass player at a wedding band, struck a quiet deal — to put together 500 flags for the ruling Trinamool Congress.

A day later, Biswas, in his mid-thirties, was briskly working with a bunch of split cane sticks at a Trinamool office near Bolpur Chowrasta. The flags were to be delivered on Saturday and he would be paid Rs 800. But Biswas expects more orders, including some from rival political parties as poll campaigning heats up.

Yet, Biswas, a maker of cane settees for a living, identifies himself as a musician who plays the “biggest brass”. “But this is Chaitra — a lean month for weddings,” he says. Unlike Biswas, singer-turned BJP MP Babul Supriyo was able to put his talent for music to work in politics last week.

Contesting again from Asansol seat, Supriyo’s song — “Ei Trinomool, Aar Na” (This Trinamool, Not Anymore) — earned him a show cause notice from the Election Commission for not seeking prior permission. However, not to be left behind, the Trinamool has released in own set of songs, one of them called “BJP Bhagao (Make the BJP Run Away)”.

As the competition of songs heated up, videos of Supriyo and Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Bengal’s minister of state for sports, dancing while celebrating Holi went viral.

Mimi & Memes
Meanwhile, Bolpur MP Anupam Hazra, who joined the BJP after being expelled from the Trinamool, has been forced to contest from Jadavpur in Kolkata after the local BJP leadership in Bolpur refused to back him.

In Jadavpur, Hazra is up against Trinamool candidate Mimi Chakraborty, a Tollywood starlet. There is another starlet in the fray on a Trinamool ticket from the Basirhat seat — Nusrat Jahan. Though Trinamool already has several celebrities in its list of legislators, many voters feel these two new entrants are novices to politics.

There was a jibe that TMC ( Trinamool Congress Party) now stood for T h e M i m i Chakraborty. Jahan too has been trolled on social media. She hit back, saying: “Trolling is a new way of demeaning women. I don’t know who these people are and why they indulge in such online abuse. I think they are simply uncultured.”

Writing on the Wall
Mimi Chakraborty’s second opponent is CPM’s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, a former mayor of Kolkata.

While Bhattacharya’s profile can dwarf his challengers, he has so far been unable to cash in on a key element of winning elections in West Bengal –wall graffiti.

A visit to Santoshpur in Jadavpur constituency showed how Trinamool supporters had plastered the walls with Chakraborty’s name, while CPM graffiti were still talking about the last assembly elections.

Tarakeshwar, a local electrician, is the key man for wall graffiti in this area, and once the nominations were announced, his men were on the ground with paintbrushes. The quickness in getting the graffiti up on the walls was visible in Bolpur too, where only the name of the Trinamool candidate could be spotted.

However, one cannot randomly paint political graffiti on the walls. There has to be three copies of the permission letters from house owners – one each for the house owner, the local party office and the state electoral office -- so that Election Commission officials to come and check.

Sens & Winnability
The BJP's Bengal unit is seeing a bit of an upheaval about candidates being parachuted in. State BJP president Dilip Ghosh even admitted that the party lacks enough winning candidates in its rank and file.

Supriyo is of course much more confident about Asansol. In 2014 he defeated Trinamool leader Dola Sen in an upset.

This time, the Union minister faces actor-turned-politician Moon Moon Sen, the Trinamool MP from Bankura, who has been asked to contest from Asansol since the party is a divided house there.

Sen beat Supriyo in hitting the ground on March 17, and a party whip said all four factional leaders in Asansol are supporting her campaign. Supriyo landed there the next day, sang his song and played an early Holi at Shatabdi Park even before his name was announced as the candidate.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on the central forces that have started doing route marches in different parts of the state and will be around for an unprecedented seven-phase polling, and their presence or absence is becoming a part of the political ping-pong.