CALCUTTA, 2 May 2004 — Is it possible for anyone to win a race against a sprint queen with two Asian Games gold medals under her belt?
Satyabrata Mukherjee, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament, thinks he can.
Mukherjee is pitted against star athlete Jyotirmoyee Sikdar who has been fielded by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to wrest the Krishnanagar Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal from the BJP in the May 10 elections.
Although Mukherjee has a clean image and judiciously used development funds allotted to him as MP, he is campaigning in every corner of the sprawling constituency to defeat the star of the 1998 Bangkok Asian Games. He says: “My honorable rival belongs to the CPI(M). So how can I drop my guard?” Thirty-five-year-old Sikdar lost her maiden election in the 2001 West Bengal provincial elections from Ranaghat (West) assembly segment of the Krishnanagar Lok Sabha seat to the Congress party’s Shankar Singh.
She lost the assembly election but Marxists did not lose faith in her. She was nominated this time from the Krishnanagar Lok Sabha seat — one of the five women among 31 candidates fielded by the CPI(M) in the state.
But she was nominated by the top brass in the teeth of opposition from the district committee, which wanted a dyed-in-the-wool communist to take on Mukherjee.
Mukherjee is not leaving anything to chance because soon after he bagged the seat in 1999, his wife and son lost the 2001 provincial elections in assembly segments of his parliamentary constituency. CPI(M) candidates trounced his wife, Urmimala Mukherjee, in Nakashipara and his son Soumendranath Mukherjee in Kaligunj by massive margins.
Their defeat was a wake-up call for the MP. Shrugging off the humiliation, he pulled out all stops to nurse his constituency. He built roads, small bridges, schools, temples and mosques to win over the electorate.
But the Gujarat carnage is haunting him. Muslims comprise 31 percent of the Krishnanagar electorate and the CPI(M) is determined to make him pay the price for the slaughter and rapes of Muslims in Gujarat.
Mukherjee says he knew all along that the CPI(M) would play the Gujarat card to nail him. So he turned down offers by BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal big guns to campaign for him lest he should antagonize Muslims and give the CPI(M) a handle to beat him.
Even as he tries to woo Muslims, Mukherjee candidly admitted: “If I lose the election, it won’t be because of Sikdar or the CPI(M) but because of Narendra Modi”.
But Sikdar too is battling an unlikely adversary in the final days of electioneering. Bacchu Das — her trainer-cum-coach — has turned against her. He shares the dais with Mukherjee regaling audiences by revealing the “darker” side of Sikdar’s personality.
Das paints her as a “very selfish woman”, a social climber and a “manipulator to the core” without citing any evidence.
The scathing attacks have left her speechless. Insiders say that she has been instructed by Marxist leaders not to start a slanging match. They fear that would badly mar her electoral prospects as Das has impeccable leftist credentials to boot. The BJP insists that it did not seek out Das. Mukherjee and Pramod Ghosh, an influential local BJP leader, said that Das approached them.
