Forty per cent of Mamata’s candidates are women

Published : Mar 13, 2019 13:34 IST

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is ready for battle in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. Barely 48 hours after the election dates were announced, the Trinamool Congress supremo announced her list of candidates for all the 42 parliamentary seats in the State. 

 Looking at a tough fight ahead against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and combating anti-incumbency, Mamata has sprung quite a few surprises in her selection of candidates. Out of the 34 MPs who won in 2014, eight have been dropped, while two left the party to join the BJP. Those who were not given the ticket, or requested that they be excused from contesting are Sugata Bose, Idris Ali, Partha Pratim Ray, Subrata Bakshi, Uma Soren, Sandhya Ray, Tapas Paul and Tapas Mondal.

Mamata also changed the constituencies of some of the candidates, on the basis of the toughness of the fight ahead. The veteran actress Moon Moon Sen, who won from Bankura in 2014, will take on the sitting BJP MP Babul Supriyo in Asansol, while in her place in Bankura will be the wily State Panchayat Minister Subrata Mukherjee. The BJP has managed to build a base for itself in Bankura and is expected to give the Trinamool a hard time in the election.

For the first time in Bengal’s recent political history more than 40 per cent of the candidates fielded by a political party are women. “This has never been achieved in India. Other parties only talk about 33 per cent reservation for women, the Trinamool Congress has not only implemented it, but raised the bar higher,” said Mamata. Seventeen of the 42 candidates are women and of them, four are well-known actresses, including two absolutely new faces in politics—Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan.

Mamata, who has also been trying to establish herself as a major force at the national level and has been one of the most strident critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also fielded candidates in other States. The Trinamool will contest six seats in Assam, three in Jharkhand, two each in Bihar and Odisha and one in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “If the Congress can contest in 10 States, then why can’t we? Ours is also a national party,” she said.

 Launching a scathing attack on the BJP government at the Centre while announcing her list of candidates, Mamata said that the Central government has failed in its tenure in the last five years. “There is rising unemployment, people are losing their jobs, farmers are committing suicide and are in distress, there are attacks on Dalits and minorities, attacks on women, neglect of the health sector… there is an attempt to change the history of this country, and institutions are being used for political purposes. There is an atmosphere of fear in the country. An unofficial emergency is more dangerous than an official emergency,” she said.

 She accused the BJP of planting seeds of hatred among the people and establishing “syndicates” of ‘Gorakshaks’ and “lynching”. Mamata, who has been criticised for the alarming growth of “syndicates” (a euphemism for extortionists and other criminal elements operating in the private housing and infrastructure industries in the State) said, “They should feel ashamed when they accuse others of syndicate activities.”

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