Constituency watch: Celebrity candidates of BJP & TMC in 4-cornered contest in Ghatal

Kolkata: The contest in the Ghatal Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal will be an interesting watch for two reasons.

First, this time the voters of Ghatal are witnessing a contest between two celebrity candidates namely Trinamool Congress’ Deepak Adhikari a.k.a. Dev and BJP’s Hiran Chatterjee, both being actors-turned-politicians.

While Adhikari is the sitting and two-time TMC Lok Sabha member from Ghatal, a post-delimitation constituency created before the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Chatterjee is the sitting BJP legislator from Kharagpur (Sadar) Assembly constituency also in West Midnapore district.

The second interesting point is that there will be a four-cornered contest at Ghatal this time following the failure of seat-sharing talks between Left Front and Congress. The Left Front ally CPI and the Congress have fielded candidates from there.

The ongoing campaign war between the two celebrity candidates at Ghatal has already become spicy. Hiran Chatterjee, always known as an outspoken individual, has accused his opponent Deepak Adhikari over the latter’s interrogations by ED in connection with a money laundering case on which the Central agency investigation is on.

“The kind of high-profile roadshows my opponent is doing is nothing but a projection of the financial affluence that he and his party enjoy. Look at us. We are walking on the roads personally interacting with the common people. The sitting MP comes to Ghatal just once a year and that is before the elections. He will vanish again if he is elected this time as well,” Chatterjee said.

Dev, otherwise known as a soft-spoken actor-politician, retorted with satire. “Let God bless my opponent with a product thought process so that he can concentrate on his own campaign instead of focusing on what I am doing. Only the voters of Ghatal will say the final word. I would request Hiran to love himself more rather than loving me,” Dev said.

Also in the poll fray is CPI’s Tapan Ganguly, basically an organisation man in the district.

Congress, at the last moment on Sunday, announced the name of Dr. Papiya Chakraborty as the party candidate from Ghatal. An alumnus of the iconic Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur and currently the general secretary of the social media cell of Congress in West Bengal, Chakraborty is a popular youth face in the party in the state.

Ghatal was formed following delimitation before the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. Of the seven constituencies under it, six are from the West Midnapore district, while one is from East Midnapore.

Amid the massive Trinamool Congress wave during the 2009 Lok Sabha polls in the state, the iconic CPI Parliamentarian Late Gurudas Dasgupta got elected from that constituency by a margin of around 1.5 lakh votes.

However, the equation changed in 2015, as Dev got elected from there. He was re-elected in 2019. This year, he almost decided to move away from electoral politics and rather concentrate on this acting career. However, he changed his mind after being convinced by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

With a voter strength of over 16 lakh, Ghatal is essentially a rural area-dominated Lok Sabha constituency. A majority of the population is dependent on agriculture.

A major problem faced by the people in the constituency almost every year is the devastating flood. Although the issue of the master plan for this calamity surfaces as an issue before every election, no concrete solution on his count has been floated as yet.

--IANS

src/dpb