Kolkata: It’s around 4 pm on a Friday afternoon, and Indian National Congress candidate Syed Shahid Imam from the Kolkata North Lok Sabha constituency seems pretty upbeat about his chances. We are in his office, on Muzaffar Ahmed (Ripon) Street in central Kolkata. The constituency goes to vote on May 19, in the seventh and the last phase of the elections in West Bengal.
On being asked how he wants to use the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Division funds if elected, Imam points out that it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ he is elected.
A mega roadshow is scheduled at 5 pm from Maniktala to Zakaria street in the northern part of the city. The party’s star campaigner Raj Babbar, a Bollywood film actor, current Rajya Sabha MP and the president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee, will also be there.
A poster for the roadshow.
A well-known lawyer by profession, this is the first time Imam is fighting the Lok Sabha elections. He made national headlines when he defended Dubai-based criminal Aftab Ansari in a case regarding his role in a terrorist attack in 2002, when five policemen were killed at the American Centre in Kolkata. Ansari was convicted in 2005.
Can having defended a man eventually convicted of ‘waging war against the state’ not hamper his chances in the current jingoistic climate? Especially when one of his opponents in North Kolkata is Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rahul Sinha, the man who brings up Pakistan in his election speeches regularly? Imam says, “Ram Jethmalani has defended so many criminals. He has defended the murderers of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.. I have not defended Indira and Rajiv’s murderers. Right?” Jethmalani was a senior member of the BJP before he was expelled from the party in 2013.
Also read: In Jadavpur, Feeble Left Defends a Bastion Against Tollywood Glamour
It is 5:15 pm now, and about 100 metres from Maniktala crossing there are tens of middle-aged and old men in shiny white kurtas on Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road. Congress flags and caps can be seen. Imam is also present. They are all getting ready for the mega roadshow.
Congress party workers tell me that the roadshow is scheduled to cover Ward 27, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 and 43 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). Ward 28 and 36 are part of the Beleghata assembly constituency and the rest of the wards come under Jorasanko. Both the assembly constituencies, along with five others (Chowrangee, Entally, Shyampukur, Maniktala and Kashipur-Belgacchhia), fall under the Kolkata North Lok Sabha constituency.
Congress workers waiting for the roadshow to begin.
The entire region is currently a Trinamool Congress stronghold. Eight out of the nine wards where the Congress is scheduled to campaign has a TMC councillor. Only one belongs to the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Shagufta Parveen, the councillor from Ward 43, won the seat during the KMC elections in 2015 when she was in the Congress, but later shifted to the TMC in 2016.
All seven assembly constituencies in Kolkata North are currently held by Trinamool MLAs and the current MP is TMC’s Sudip Bandyopadhyay, who won the seat in both 2009 and 2014. In 2014, he won the seat by over one lakh votes. He had defeated Congress candidate Somendra Nath by over two lakh votes. Congress had finished fourth in the constituency after the TMC, Bharatiya Janata Party and CPI(M).
The vehicle for Imam’s roadshow.
The Congress has miles to cover, and things do not look promising. It is just past 6:30 pm now. A slight drizzle some time ago made the main road a little wet, and the clouds still don’t look encouraging for the mega roadshow. However, what is a bigger cause of concern for the party is that their star campaigner, Raj Babbar, has not yet arrived at the scene. And as a result, the roadshow scheduled for an hour and a half earlier has not even begun.
The crowd has become bigger than what it was and there are around 80 people ready to begin campaigning. Imam is evidently getting impatient. After he speaks to a few key people, it is announced that the roadshow will begin without Babbar. He will perhaps join in later.
Imam says to himself, loudly, “Aayega, aayega. Nahin ayega, nahin ayega. Fatt (If he comes, he’ll come. If he doesn’t come, he won’t come. Fatt).”
The show finally begins. People on bikes lead the way as Imam waves from the jeep to everyone he can lay his eyes on. Chants of ‘Rahul Gandhi zindabad’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ can be heard repeatedly from a small but evidently passionate bunch of Congress workers.
When the group moves onto Keshab Sen Street, one shopkeeper observing the proceeding tells me, “He will lose his deposit.” Another man standing beside him repeats the exact same lines. They identify as Muslims. I tell them that Congress is the only party which has fielded a Muslim from the constituency. They say, “So? Sudip Bandyopadhyay is the man here.”
Every person that I speak to on the street is either going to vote for the TMC or is convinced that the party is likely to win from North Kolkata. No Muslim I spoke to said that they would vote for the Congress.
This roadshow seems like an attempt to reach out to the Muslim community in particular. Leaflets written only in Urdu have been printed for the campaign and it is supposed to go through Muslim-majority areas such as Rajabazaar and Zakaria Street, where the largest mosque in the city, Nakhoda Masjid, is also located.
However, the roadshow comes to a premature end at around 7:40 pm at Raja Ram Mohan Roy Sarani, which is more than 1.5 km away from Zakaria Street. Imam makes a short speech.
Also read: BJP’s Bengal Unit Embarrassed as Modi’s Kolkata Rally Fails to Pull a Crowd
While Imam did seem confident in his chambers, an important roadshow has gone awry less than 25 days before polling.
The candidate tells me that Raj Babbar got a call from Rahul Gandhi and is heading to Delhi because he is needed there urgently. While this is the official reason provided, other Congress workers tell me that Babbar is very delayed, and the team decided to end the roadshow for that reason.
Babbar had created a controversy before the 2018 Madhya Pradesh elections when he had compared the falling value of the rupee to the age of Narendra Modi’s mother at a rally in Indore. And now he hasn’t helped the Congress’s chances in Kolkata North, where it has a gigantic mountain to climb by May 19. On Friday, in fact, he made a comment about Mamata Banerjee that many have called out as sexist. He asked how she “knew Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s shirt size”, after Modi said in his conversation with Akshay Kumar that she gifts him kurtas.
All images by Souradipto Sanyal.
Sourodipto Sanyal is a freelance journalist currently based in Kolkata. He largely writes on Indian politics and cinema, and tweets @sourodipto1.