A turncoat and a ‘missing’ MP cost BJP two seats in South Bengal

Among the losses suffered by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, two seats stand out — Hooghly and Barrackpore. Sprawled across the opposing banks of the Hooghly river and in strategic proximity to Kolkata, both constituencies caused a significant setback to the BJP’s performance in the State with the defeat of Arjun Singh and Locket Chatterjee.

In Barrackpore, Mr. Singh lost to the Trinamool Congress’s Partha Bhowmick by a margin of 64,438 votes. In Hooghly, Trinamool candidate and actor Rachna Banerjee defeated Ms. Chatterjee by a margin of 76,853 votes.

According to the Ministry of Textiles, India has 98 composite jute mills of which 75 are in West Bengal. Many of these are nestled across Hooghly and Barrackpore.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Ms. Chatterjee, an actor-turned-politician, defeated her Trinamool rival by a margin of over 70,000 votes. The same year, after the alleged suicide of an out-of-work jute mill worker in Chinsurah, she blamed the Trinamool government for the rampant closure of jute mills in the region and the “brainwashing” of labour unions.

“The majority of jute belt workers in West Bengal are Hindi speakers and the BJP candidates had a huge impact on them in 2019,” said Anadi Sahu, general secretary of the West Bengal unit of Centre of Indian Trade Unions, the labour arm of the CPI(M). As of this year, he said, around 2.5 lakh workers are employed in Bengal’s jute industry. He said that in a Lok Sabha election, the Hindi-speaking workers often reflect the popular sentiment of North India’s Hindi-speaking belt, particularly the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. “That’s why if you notice, the wind blew in a different direction this year both in Uttar Pradesh as well as in Hooghly and Barrackpore constituencies,” he said.

Mr. Sahu said the BJP and the Trinamool have been apathetic to issues plaguing Bengal’s jute belt which include a shortage of orders, rampant closure of mills, little work for labourers, and mill owners holding back gratuity of the retired workers. “Neither of the parties has done much to develop or modernise this industry and the workers are disgruntled,” he said.

Ahead of the 2024 election, Ms. Chatterjee was accused by the Trinamool of doing little for the industrial development of her constituency and remaining detached from the people. The party called her a ‘missing MP’. She retorted by saying the Trinamool government hindered her from solving Hooghly’s problems.

In Barrackpore, for the last five years, voters saw Mr. Singh going back and forth between the two rival parties. In 2019, he ended his long association with the Trinamool and won the Barrackpore seat on a BJP ticket with a margin of around 13,000 votes. Three years later, Mr. Singh returned to the Trinamool amid the price-cap crisis in the jute industry that had led to the closure of around a dozen jute mills in Barrackpore and job losses. However, ahead of the 2024 election, he joined the BJP after being denied a ticket by the Trinamool.