Of the seven Assembly bye-elections that will take place in six different states on September 5, only one is from West Bengal. But this one Assembly seat is an important one. It is the Dhupguri Assembly seat.

In the Assembly elections of 2021, this Assembly seat from northern Bengal went to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political party which is West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool’s main contender in the state currently. The bagging of the Dhupguri seat, in fact, was one of the indicators of how the BJP was gaining ground and winning seats in the state and indeed in that election the saffron party had shot up from only three seats in the Assembly to 77.

This July, however the seat fell vacant when the BJP MLA, Bishnu Pada Roy, who was suffering from a lung infection, died. He was 61. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee expressed their deepest condolences.
On September 5th, however, the political feud between the two parties would resurface when Trinamool and BJP fight tooth and nail for capturing the seat. Or rather recapturing it. “Recapturing” because both BJP and the Trinamool had held the seat earlier. Before BJP’s Roy won the seat in 2021, Trinamool’s Mithali Roy had won the seat in the Assembly elections of 2016.

Dhupguri is a Rajabanshi-dominated area which is a community of people, like the Gorkhas of Darjeeling, who control the voting patterns of that region. BJP has for the past decade and a half, for instance, held the Darjeeling seat, to a great degree because of the support the Gorkhas. While the West Bengal government had categorically ruled out the division of Bengal and said no to a separate state for the Gokhas the BJP’s equivocal stance on the creation of Gorkhaland issue was a political strategy. The Rajabanshis, like the Gorkhas, whose demand for a separate state had been based on identity and language, too determine who they prefer as their leader, whether Panchayat, Assembly or Parliamentary and this is at the center of the tussle for power over this seat.