As Mamata’s seat prepares to vote, faith is thin: ‘Whoever comes to Lanka will be Ravan’

For 30 years, Bapi Das has run his tea shop on a narrow Bhabanipur lane, stirring kettles, watching governments come and go. When you ask him about the BJP – whether it might throw up a surprise this time – he looks up and offers a parable.

“If I am making tea and I just say how good it is instead of feeding you, why will you believe me?”

Bhabanipur goes to the polls on April 29, in the second phase of the West Bengal assembly elections. But this is no ordinary Kolkata seat. It is Mamata Banerjee’s home turf, the ground on which she has chosen to face BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari directly. She has held the seat since 2011, though her most recent path was unconventional: after a narrow loss to Adhikari in Nandigram in May 2021, she returned to her home turf that October to reclaim the seat in a landslide bypoll.

This is a layered constituency – a mixed religious demography with affluent Bengali households and middle-class families sharing the neighbourhood with Gujarati, Marwari, Sikh, Punjabi, and Bihari migrant communities who came here to drive taxis, run shops, and build lives. But days before polling day, there is a weariness. 

The migrants

Raja Lal Paswan arrived from Bihar before 1980, young and hopeful, to drive taxis in the city. He has been driving for a company in Bhabanipur ever since. He is thinking about retirement now, about going home to Bihar. The Bengal he came to, he says, has fewer opportunities than it used to.

“BJP ashuk ebar, poriborton hok, kaaj hok,” he says. (Let the BJP come this time. Let there be change. Let work get done.)

Many jute mills and factories near Shyamnagar, his hometown, have shut down, he claims. He now earns Rs 20,000 a month, with a small annual increase. His wife, Chandarma Devi, 52, applied for the Lakshmir Bhandar (monthly financial assistance to women) scheme two years ago for financial relief. They are still waiting.

Unemployment is a significant political and economic issue in West Bengal. But the data paints a mixed picture. The state’s headline unemployment rate is relatively low compared with the national average, yet many young people and workers still face underemployment, dependence on the informal sector, and job-quality problems. All parties have made a slew of promises to fix the problem. The TMC is relying on Lakshmir Bhandar and several other welfare schemes.

The economic uncertainty can seep into other problems. “SIR is the right thing to do,” Paswan adds, on the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. “We are not getting work, but illegal people from other countries are getting jobs. This was important.”

Kishore Mandal, another Bihari migrant who works at a shop in the area, sees it differently. The 56-year-old remembers what the roads looked like before 2011. He has watched them improve. His wife receives Lakshmir Bhandar. By his own account, he is content with what the TMC has delivered.

Dilip Manot runs a dyeing shop in Bara Bazar and is blunt about his politics: he has no loyalty to TMC, BJP, or the Left. Whoever works, wins his approval. He asks why people are leaving Bengal to find work elsewhere, and believes there is a lack of jobs stemming from poor implementation of plans rather than a total absence of opportunity.

“Just because Bhabanipur is the CM’s constituency doesn’t mean it receives any special treatment in terms of progress and improvement,” he says. 

He also accuses the TMC of Muslim appeasement. On the SIR exercise, he says it should happen every five years, as identity documents can be forged. 

After the publication of the final voter roll, over 47,000 names had been deleted, and over 14,000 were listed “under adjudication” in Bhabanipur. The supplementary lists confirmed the deletion of 3,875 voters from the adjudicated list – of which 1,554, or around 40 percent, were Muslims, as per the SABAR Institute.

Parijat Roy teaches tuition classes in Bhabanipur. When he talks about the Left Front years, he says there was better infrastructure, a functioning education system, and a different kind of politics. But in recent years, reports have pointed to a worrying trend for public education.

Roy’s sharpest words are reserved for the state of education under TMC. “Education ta je shesh kore diyeche, jei party te shiksha mantri jail e jaay shei state e administration kon jaigay chole gache”. (They have finished the education system. What is the level of a government administration whose education minister goes to jail?)

He is referring to the arrest of Partha Chatterjee in a school-teacher recruitment scam. In fact, this case has become emblematic of the TMC government’s record on education. Chatterjee, who spent over three years in custody before being released on bail last November, faced fresh Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids on his residence earlier this month.

Roy sees cash schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar and Yuva Saathi (a monthly dole for unemployed youth) as cosmetic. Without education and employment, he says, welfare transfers mean little. At the same time, he is sceptical of the BJP. 

“BJP is a party of polarisation… Hindus and Muslims should live in harmony.”

‘Whoever comes to Lanka will be Ravan’

Bapi Das gives credit where he thinks it’s due: TMC has built water supply infrastructure and improved roads, he says. But at the same time, he points to public schools in the vicinity to say enrolments are dwindling. He is not prepared to vote for either the TMC or the BJP, but he will anyway vote with low expectations.

Life, many people here seem to feel, will continue more or less as before. Raja Lal Paswan has a saying for it. 

“Sarkar to shobi chor eta jene rakhun, je lanka te she ravan hobe.” (Remember, all governments are thieves. Whoever comes to Lanka will be Ravan.)

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