With BJP national president Amit Shah setting a target of winning at least 23 Lok Sabha seats from West Bengal, the party is eyeing the adjoining district and industrial belt of Howrah comprising a sizeable non-Bengali population for putting up an impressive show.
Howrah, where the BJP has started gaining ground of late, nominated former journalist Rantidev Sengupta against former Indian national football team captain and two times sitting MP from this constituency Prasun Banerjee who will look to score a hattrick.
Rantidev Sengupta, a former editor of a Bengali newspaper, is considered close to the RSS. But it’s to be seen how he measures the ‘rising acceptance of the BJP’ among the people in a constituency that has traditionally been in favour of either the Left or the Congress, and lately with the TMC.
Communists won the Howrah seat nine times in 15 general elections and one byelection held so far from 1951. In the past, the Congress won the seat four times, the last time in 1996 when former Union Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi was declared the winner.
In 1998 the newborn Trinamool annexed the seat by getting elected its candidate Bikram Sarkar but had to concede it to the Left next year as CPI(M)’s Swadesh Chakraborty not only regained the seat for his party but also retained it till 2009 before a Trinamool wave swept the state.
The people of the constituency reaffirmed their faith in the TMC in 2013 by electing former captain of the Indian football team, Prasun Banerjee, when a by-election was held following the death of the incumbent MP Ambica Banerjee.
In the 2013 by-election, Banerjee of the TMC defeated his nearest rival Sridip Bhattacharya by a margin of about 27,000 votes. But that time the BJP, which had polled more than 37,000 votes in 2009, didn’t field any candidate favouring the TMC.
In the previous Lok Sabha elections held in 2014, former footballer Banerjee won this seat, defeating his nearest rival Sridip Bhattacharya of the CPI(M) by nearly two lakh votes.
The BJP’s actor candidate George Baker polled 2.48 lakh votes while the Congress’s Manoj Kumar Pandey got just over 63,000 votes.
The TMC’s vote-share in 2014 was 43.39 as against the Left’s 25.89. The BJP got 22.04 per cent vote share while the Congress got 5.62 per cent.
TMC has fielded Prasun Banerjee again from this constituency. To defeat the sitting MP, BJP has fielded journalist Rantidev Sengupta, while Congress has announced Suvra Ghosh as their candidate. CPI (M) has fielded Sumitra Adhikary.
