Lok Sabha Elections 2024 | It’s Banerjees vs Adhikaris in Tamluk with a Young Turk and former judge as proxies

Tamluk (West Bengal): “Will you not take revenge for 2021 on Saturday?” Abhishek Banerjee asks, at a rally in Nandigram in the Tamluk Lok Sabha constituency of the state. “Yes”, the crowd roars. Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and the Trinamool Congress’s general secretary smiles.

“The game is still on. Khela Hobe,” he says, repeating the TMC’s war cry for the 2021 state assembly elections, before pleading for votes for the party’s Young Turk Debangshu Bhattacharya, who is credited with popularising the slogan.

Debangshu is the TMC’s candidate in the Tamluk Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal. He is taking on Abhijit Ganguly, who quit his job as a judge of the Calcutta High Court to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and contest as its candidate.

But in Tamluk, or, for that matter, in any other constituency in Purba and Paschim Medinipur district, the real fight is between the Banerjees and the Adhikaris – the family of the state BJP heavyweight, Suvendu Adhikari, who beat Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram in the 2021 assembly elections with a margin of less than 2000 votes.

It was in Nandigram where an agitation by farmers against the proposed acquisition of land for setting up a special economic zone for chemical industries in 2007 and 2008 had set the stage for the end of the Left Front’s 34-year-long rule and the ascent of Banerjee’s party to power in 2011. The TMC, which had a landslide victory in 2021, couldn’t yet accept the defeat of the state’s chief minister in Nandigram.

“He (Suvendu) won by deceit by changing votes on four EVMs after disrupting the power supply to the vote counting centre. But you can now teach him a lesson by voting for Debangshu,” says Abhishek.

Suvendu played a key role in TMC’s rise from the 2007-2008 agitation in Nandigram. He, however, resigned from Banerjee’s cabinet, quit the TMC, and joined the BJP in December 2020. His father Sisir Adhikari and brother Dibyendu Adhikari continued as the TMC’s members in the Lok Sabha on record but dissociated themselves from the party for all practical purposes.

“They (the TMC leaders) call me ‘gaddar’ (traitor), but what about Banerjee? She, herself, had betrayed Rajiv Gandhi by splitting the Congress in West Bengal and launching the TMC. She had also betrayed Atal Behari Vajpayee, by quitting his cabinet,” argues Suvendu, now the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, as he campaigns for his other brother Soumendu, who is the BJP’s candidate in Kanthi, the epicentre of the power of the Adhikaris.

Ganguly’s several orders as a judge of the high court against the TMC government in connection with the recruitment scam earned him a “crusader against corruption” image, which the BJP hopes to cash in on in the Lok Sabha elections.

“I am here to continue my fight against corruption,” says the actor-turned-bureaucrat-turned-lawyer-turned-judge-turned-politician, who was recently barred by the Election Commission from campaigning for 24 hours after he made a comment about Banerjee.

“That he was pursuing a political agenda as a judge, maligning the TMC government, and taking away jobs from young people by cancelling recruitment got completely exposed, when he joined the BJP and came to contest the LS elections,” Debangshu says targeting Ganguly.

Asit Banerjee, the TMC’s district president, says that it is the reign of Adhikaris in and around Tamluk that his party is fighting to end. “He (Suvendu) switched to the BJP so that he could continue his extortion racket in Tamluk and Kanthi.”

The BJP hopes that Sayan Banerjee, the CPI (M)’s candidate in Tamluk, will make it difficult for the TMC by taking away a significant chunk of the minority community’s votes in Tamluk.

Apart from slamming TMC for corruption and the BJP for communal politics, Sayan, a young advocate, is promising to fight for employment opportunities for youths, rail links, and cold storages for flower and betel-leaf farmers of the constituency.

He is promising to fight against the “extortion rackets” run by both the BJP and the TMC leaders. The TMC is also expecting the young communist to help it, by bringing some of the leftist votes back to the CPI(M) from the BJP’s kitty.