Kolkata: One of the key roads leading goods and commuters in and out of the Kolkata megapolis is the Durgapur Expressway. Traffic on the road that leads toward Jharkhand, Bihar and further on, remains moderately high.
“This could have been much higher,” rues Banamali Pal of Shingher Bheri. “See that crumbling remains of a structure? That is where many things ended, including the prospect of a much higher density of traffic and footfalls. It just stares at us every moment like a ghost, even in the daytime,” Pal said gazing aimlessly at the wild grass and the black tarmac of the road as vehicles zoom by.
Singher Bheri, Beraberi, Bajemelia or Khaser Bheri, simply don't want to discuss one subject – a motorcar factory. Singur, which had changed Bengal’s political narrative in 2011, is somewhat alienated today. On May 20, Banamali and thousands like him will queue outside polling booths as the Hooghly Lok Sabha seat goes to the polls, but with a blank gaze.
With its rich colonial history, the Hooghly constituency presents one of the best-known European flavours that one can think of. The Portuguese settlement in Bandel, the Danish settlement in Srirampur, the erstwhile Dutch colony in Chinsurah, or the French colony of Chandannagore, Hooghly has much to offer to history lovers and enthusiasts. And so was its Marxist lineage.
The Hooghly seat had its tryst with saffron as early as the first general election that the country saw. Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee had won the general elections of 1952 from this seat as a nominee of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, the earlier version of today’s BJP. And that was it.
From the second general elections in 1957 to 2009, barring only once in 1984 after the death of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi when Indumati Bhattacharya of the Congress managed to win, Hooghly has always been a Red fort. First, the CPI and then the CPI(M) have been a permanent fixture in this seat. Hooghly and its MP, CPI(M)’s Rupchand Pal were synonymous. But, all that changed in the summer of 2009.
The CPI(M) had been sensing trouble for some time in one of their safest seats in Bengal. The reason can be attributed to many factors. The Dunlop tyre plant at Sahaganj had shut down by then. The HindMotor factory churning out the iconic Ambassador cars, had downed shutters. The once vibrant jute industry of Hooghly, which dotted the banks of Hooghly River from Tribeni to Rishra and Konnagar, was sick. The cotton mills, small and medium industries, fertilizer units were all reeling under acute crisis, resulting in a huge change in the job scenario. The Left knew bad days were ahead. And then came Singur in 2006.
It was as early as July 2006, when Mamata Banerjee, then the lone Trinamool Congress member in Lok Sabha, sowed paddy seeds near Singur as a mark of protest against land acquisition by the state government for a Tata Motors' small car factory. Things moved fast and by early next year Tata Motors started construction work on their plant. In December 2007, Mamata started an indefinite hunger strike on the Singur issue, only to end it after 25 days. Though the Calcutta High Court validated the state government’s land acquisition in Singur in January 2008, Mamata kept the protest pot boiling.
The first dividends came in May 2008 when Trinamool Congress won the majority in the Panchayat elections. With the rural votes secured, Mamata stepped up her ante by launching an indefinite sit-in at Singur on August 24, 2008. The following month, Tata Motors suspended work. Though both Mamata and the state government led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee started some negotiations over the Singur imbroglio in early September of that year, talks broke down barely two days later. On October 3, 2008 Tata Motors announced its decision to pull out of Singur. And in the 2009 general elections, Rupchand Pal of CPI(M) lost to Dr Ratna De Nag of the Trinamool Congress from Hooghly Lok Sabha by a little over 81,000 votes.
The circle was half complete for Mamata, which finally took shape in the 2011 Assembly elections when she ended the Left Front’s 34-year-long stint in Bengal. The Nandigram firing incident had also added fuel to the fire. But, that is a different story.
Incidentally, something else also happened in 2009. For the first time since that 1952 election, the BJP managed to get around 40,000 votes in Hooghly. This figure made a phenomenal jump in the 2014 elections when scribe-turned-politician Chandan Mitra was fielded by the BJP from Hooghly. Mitra got over two lakh votes or a rise of around 13% of the vote share! The saffron brigade had sensed blood and in 2019 actor Locket Chatterjee trounced Ratna De Nag and brought the Hooghly seat to BJP’s kitty.
Since then, much water has flown down the Hooghly River. The dynamics of Hooghly have also changed rapidly, and in the 2021 Assembly elections, it was a whitewash for the Trinamool Congress from all seven Assembly segments. Such was the performance of TMC that even Locket Chatterjee, who contested from the Chunchura Assembly seat, had to bite dust. When Hooghly goes to the polls on May 20, Locket will be facing her one-time colleague in the cine industry, Rachna Banerjee, who is better known as ‘Didi Number 1’ after her popular game show on television. Both BJP’s Locket and TMC’s Rachna have Monodip Ghosh of the CPI(M) as an opponent.
Recent posters across several localities of Hooghly sum up the prime issue against Locket. The actor, who is now more a politician, has seen ‘Missing’ posters in her name pasted on Hooghly walls. The allegation is, she has been inconspicuous in her presence in her constituency. Locket vehemently refutes it.
So does Rachna, but about a different set of allegations. That of deep-seated infighting within the Hooghly Trinamool Congress, especially in Balagarh and Pandua Assembly segments. Added to it are allegations of rampant corruption. Two TMC functionaries from the Balagarh area, Santanu Bandopadhyay and Kuntal Ghosh, are already behind bars in connection with the recruitment scam. Rachna’s only saviour is, she is an outsider, alien to infighting, and a political greenhorn.
For Monodip, the task is extremely uphill. He has started from the 2019 figures when the combined vote share of the CPI(M) and Congress was barely 10%. For Rupchand’s successor in Hooghly, as the Bard would tell us, therein lies the rub.
The contest between the two cine stars Locket and Rachna is expected to be a high-voltage one. Only the western flank of Durgapur Expressway in Singur remains barren, a silent spectator to what could have been an extremely busy thoroughfare, a bustling neighbourhood with a car factory.
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