The battle in Asansol constituency on 29 April between two outgoing MPs, BJP’s Babul Supriyo and TMC’s Mrs Dev Burman aka Moon Moon Sen will be watched by all in this Lok Sabha polls in West Bengal.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when the country-wide Modi wave reached the zenith, the lotus bloomed in the country’s oldest coalfields on the Bengal-Jharkhand border. BJP polled the highest percentage of votes among all the 42 seats in Bengal in Asansol and won it on its own merits — the victory in Darjeeling owing mostly to the GJMM’s support.

The party’s candidate in the 2009 elections, Surya Roy, had polled a meagre 5 per cent of the votes then. In contrast, Bollywood playback singer Babul Supriyo secured a whopping 39 per cent in 2014. It was obvious that the BJP central think-tank led by national president Amit Shah has once again set its eye on this prestigious seat which has elected eminent leaders like Atulya Ghosh, Ananda Gopal Mukherjee and Robin Sen in the past.

The crowds at the Asansol ground at PM Narendra Modi’s campaign rally on Tuesday will have rekindled fresh hope among the BJP mandarins. To bring back the tide in his favour, Narendra Modi flew to the historic Polo Ground here for the fourth time in the past five years. The witty PM left no stones unturned in his fierce attack amid the pressure cooker-like situation in the typical colliery belt in April summer.

Anti-incumbency sentiments expressed by a section of the population here against the eight-year-old TMC government will have encouraged the saffron camp. A tea stall owner at Jamuria Bazar, Sukanta Pal, says, “People are fed up with the TMC government in the state and have been looking for a strong replacement in the coal belt.”

Jamuria and Raniganj had been a CPI-M fortress, but it appears that the lotus could bloom again in the once red bastion.

A total of ten people are in the fray in Asansol but it clearly will be a triangular contest among Babul Supriyo (BJP), Moon Moon Sen (TMC) and Gouranga Chatterjee (CPI-M). The rest are of academic interest only.

After the loss here in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, an angry Mamata Banerjee had removed local heavyweight Moloy Ghatak from her cabinet and his brother Abhijeet Ghatak from a party youth post for “sabotage”. Both were inducted again a few months later. This time around, all local TMC heavy weights ~ Moloy Ghatak, Tapas Banerjee, Jitendra Tewari, Ujjwal Chatterjee, Bidhan Upadhaya, Sohrab Ali, V.Sivadasan ~ have been roped in with one single purpose to ensure the victory of the TMC candidate.

CM Mamata Banerjee campaigned twice in Asansol and Raniganj, Abhishek Banerjee, Aroop Biswas, actor Deb, former Union minister Yashwant Sinha etc had been campaigning for Moon Moon Sen as the Asansol seat has become a prestige fight for TMC now.

In 2014, during campaigning, Banerjee had called the Biharis living here “guests”, which had irked them at that time. TMC candidate Moon Moon Sen appears to have repeated that mistake, describing the Biharis as good police informers, during her campaign.

Over 45 per cent of the total 16,14,917 voters of Asansol are non-Bengalis.

The outgoing Bankura MP talks of reopening the Hindustan Cables factory in Rupnarayanpur and Burn Standard factory in Burnpur if elected and banks on the 28 per cent minority vote bank and the development works of the TMC government, like the setting up of a new district, a police commissionerate, university, mega corporation etc but urges people to vote for Mamata Banerjee. She has been staying in a posh hotel along the national highway campaigning for a few hours in the evening and a couple of hours in the day as she complains about the increasing level of air pollution and pot-holed roads.

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