So far only two phases of Lok Sabha have taken place in the country, including in West Bengal and this is just a trailer. Picture abhi baki hai!
Coupled with back-to-back jolts for the Trinamool Congress government in the form of the court verdict on job scam and the discovery of a huge cache of arms in Sandeshkhali on Friday and Mamatas fall while boarding a chopper on Saturday, the political temperature has already reached a flashpoint.
FPJ takes a quick look at the remaining phases and analyses the importance of a few seats where the fight could go down the wire.
Behrampore, Bardhaman and Asansol will go to polls in the fourth phase on May 14. To start with, Behrampore will see a keen contest between Congress veteran Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and former cricketing icon and TMC candidate Yusuf Pathan. Though some opine it will not be difficult for Adhir to clinch victory, Pathan might just click among the young Muslim voters and it is needless to say it is a Muslim-dominated constituency.
Bardhaman will see BJP veteran Dilip Ghosh pitted against 1983 World Cup winning team player Kirti Azad. However, even as Ghosh will cruise through, he was “not quite happy” after his original seat Medinipur was not given to him. In Asansol, Shatrughan is well placed, but as they say, anything is possible on the D-day.
In Phase 6, all eyes will be on Tamluk where the famed retired Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay will make his electoral debut. Tamluk is a safe seat for him as it is the bastion of West Bengal Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari.
In the last phase, constituencies like Basirhat, Diamond Harbour, Jadavpur will hog the limelight. Basirhat has been in the news for Sandeshkhali, which not only rocked the state but made headlines across the nation and is still creating ripples. It is another Muslimdominated constituency.
The contest at Diamond Harbour will be crucial as TMC's yuvraj and strongman Abhishek Banerjee is the TMC candidate. And last but not the least Jadavpur has always been a crucial constituency where giant killers have been created. In 1984, Mamata Banerjee was then a member of the Congress and she defeated Somnath Chatterjee to become the youngest Lok Sabha MP at 29.
Mamata Banerjee secured 3,31,618 or 50.87 per cent votes against 3,11,958 or 47.85 per cent votes to Somnath Chatterjee in the December 1984 LS election at Jadavpur. This proved to be the only election that Somnath Chatterjee lost in his political career spanning over four decades.
In the 2011 state assembly election, the then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was defeated by former chief secretary of his own government, and the Trinamool Congress candidate Manish Gupta by 16,684 votes.
However, this time both TMC and CPI-M candidates are young.
