TMC flags (left) and BJP flags
Asansol: Reopening factories closed for years, addressing scarcity of drinking water in rural pockets and curbing the menace of illegal mining in abandoned coal mines are the core issues for the people of Asansol Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal.
The district lies in the mining and industrial belt of the state, where the Raniganj, Pandaveswar and Jamoria cantonment sectors include coal mines and Kulti serves as home to some major factories.
Asansol, which borders Jharkhand, has a large Hindi-speaking population, most of whom are migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who work in mines and factories.
While the TMC repeated Bollywood star Shatrughan Sinha aka ‘Bihari Babu’ as its candidate for this seat, the BJP settled on its veteran leader Surendrajit Singh Ahluwalia who was born and brought up in the city.
The Communist Party of India (Maoist) has nominated Jahanara Khan, who has emerged for the first time in the Lok Sabha polls, in the seat that also includes a sizable number of tribals.
Sinha won the 2022 by-election here by over 3,000 votes after BJP MP Babul Supriyo vacated the seat, which he had held in 2014 and 2019, and moved to the TMC.
Sinha expressed confidence in retaining the seat with a larger margin this time.
“I will get more support from people in the constituency in this election,” he told PTI.
Left candidate Khan, who is a two-time MLA from Jamoria, alleged that neither Sinha nor Supriyo had done much to alleviate the problems of the locals.
She added, “Poor tribes and minorities in rural areas suffer from a huge scarcity of drinking water, but not much has been done so far to solve this crisis.”
Claiming that illegal mining from abandoned coal mines in the area is rampant, she said this menace must be stopped to prevent land subsidence and mudslides that claim people’s lives almost every year.
Acknowledging the rural water crisis, TMC’s Pandaveswar MLA Narendranath Chakraborty said the water level depletes in the summer months in the mine area, which he maintained was a “natural occurrence”.
“We are delivering water to homes, and tanks are being built in every building,” he said, adding that water is being supplied through tankers in many places as a stop-gap measure.
Sambo Maji, a resident of Kulti, said he wants to reopen the factories, which have been closed for years due to issues ranging from “militant unionism” to lack of timely modernization.
“If factories return to work, our children will not have to migrate in search of a living,” he said.
Many well-known factories such as those in Sen-Raleigh and Asansol Glass have closed their doors over the years.
According to Ajay Ghosh from Dishergarh, illegal sand mining from Damodar is on the rise and must be stopped.
The BJP took some time to formally name Ahluwalia, fondly called ‘Sardarji’ by many, for the Asansol seat after Bhojpuri singer Pawan Singh stepped down from the contest.
In the 2019 elections, Ahluwalia won the neighboring Bardhaman-Durgapur seat, where the BJP nominated former state president Dilip Ghosh this time.
Ahluwalia, also a former Rajya Sabha MP, won the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat in northern West Bengal in 2014.
He won the 2019 elections by a narrow margin of 18,540 votes and managed to offer only one seat to his party out of the seven Assembly seats in Bardhaman-Durgapur during the 2021 state elections.
Ahluwalia faces the crucial test of overshadowing TMC’s gains in Asansol, where five out of seven assembly segments went to the Mamata Banerjee-led party in 2021.
During a recent election rally in Kulti, Banerjee criticized Ahluwalia and accused him of playing a vanishing role from Bardhaman-Durgapur for the past five years.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces claimed that it “managed to obtain a ticket for this seat after putting in a lot of effort.”
Local BJP leader Jitendra Tiwari claimed that the presence of an experienced activist like Ahluwalia in Asansol had boosted the morale of his party workers to win back the seat.
Dismissing TMC’s claim of Ahluwalia’s absence, Tiwari asked: “In this way, how many times have we seen Shatrughan Sinha in Asansol in the last two years?” Sinha, a two-term BJP MP from Patna Sahib, joined the Congress before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and moved to TMC in 2022.
Among his many films, Sinha co-starred with Amitabh Bachchan in Kaala Patthar, a 1979 hit Bollywood film based on the Chasnala coal mine tragedy in neighboring Dhanbad.
Terming Sinha an “acting legend”, the Pandaveswar MLA said the yesteryear star still has a crazy fan following.
“As a Member of Parliament, he worked for Asansol and MPLAD funds were properly used for the welfare of the people,” he said.
Confident of the huge margin, Chakraborty said the leader meant business when it came to development and maintained a polite behavior with people.
Local CPI(M) leader Partha Mukherjee claimed that people would vote against the “ideological bankruptcy of TMC and BJP”.
“All the anti-TCM and anti-BJP forces will come together to defeat them and we are sure that Jahanara Khan will win Asansol,” he said.
Asansol goes to the polls in the fourth phase on May 13.