Deepa Das Munshi and Sonia Gandhi at an election rally in Raiganj on Monday. (PTI)

THE RIVAL

CPM’s Bireswar Lahiri. Deepa can’t afford to take him lightly because the Left parties, which lost the rural polls because of bickering among themselves, have buried the hatchet and vowed to come out strong. “All of us took our lessons,” says Lahiri

THE HIDDEN ENEMY

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Independent candidate Karim Chaudhuri, the former president of the North Dinajpur Trinamul Congress. More than the Muslim leader’s popularity, Deepa is worried by the “designs” of the players who have “propped” him up

If Ghani Khan Chowdhury, lying in his grave in the family burial ground, gives hope and strength to his brother and niece in Malda, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, lying in his hospital bed in distant New Delhi, remains the best guide to electoral politics for wife Deepa at Raiganj.

As the Congress candidates from the Khan Chowdhury family invoke the late Ghani Khan’s “dream” for Malda, so does Deepa, asking voters to send her to the Lok Sabha to fulfil Priyada’s “dream”. His pictures — and his work for Raiganj, especially a train to Calcutta and the promise of an AIIMS-type medical institution — dominate her campaign.

There the similarity ends. The two towns are very different — Malda, a historic town which was once the kingdom of Bengal’s last Hindu rulers and now a bustling trading junction; and Raiganj, a new settlement populated almost entirely by refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Just as the towns are different, so are their Congress campaigners. Unlike her counterparts in Malda, Deepa, once a protege of her husband, is now very much a politician in her own right. She may not have her husband’s public relations skills; many, even in her own party, think she has acquired at least one common trait of Indian politicians — arrogance — rather too early for her brief political career.

But the best thing she has learnt and inherited from her husband is the ability to handle the party organisation.

Does she miss his skills in the use of the election machinery? “No, no. I have been his election agent in the last three elections here,” she responds sharply, sitting in a crowded party office at Kaliagunj during a brief stop in her road show.

“And when Priyada didn’t come to Raiganj for a year out of sadness because of his defeat in the 1998 elections, I took over the job of keeping in touch with the people here.”

She goes on to say how all that helped the party strengthen the organisation. The Congress has ruled the Raiganj municipality for a long time. But thanks to the husband-and-wife team, the party went on to capture all the other three municipalities falling within the Raiganj Lok Sabha constituency.

The latest feather in the party’s cap was its success in the panchayat polls last year, when the party wrested the zilla parishad from the CPM-led Left Front for the first time.

With such records Deepa should have been sitting pretty, waiting to step into her husband’s shoes. But she can’t be complacent and that for good reasons.

Bireswar Lahiri, the CPM candidate and the party’s North Dinajpur district unit secretary, gives his side of the panchayat story. The Left’s losses in the rural polls, he says, were mainly because of the bitter rivalries and even open hostilities between the CPM and its allies, especially the Forward Bloc.

“Add up the total Left votes and we are 66,000 votes ahead of the combined Opposition,” Lahiri says.

But what has happened in one year to turn the Leftist foes into friends again? “All of us took our lessons” is Lahiri’s answer.

Hafiz Ali Sairani, the Bloc leader in the district, who lost to Deepa in the 2006 Assembly elections from Goalpokhar, cites the example of Chakulia, the main theatre of the CPM-Bloc battles in the panchayat polls. “Go there today and you’ll see how we’ve buried the hatchet and are fighting as one.”

How true that is can only be tested on election day.

But the Left’s other hope is one of Deepa’s major concerns. The devil called delimitation has cast its shadow on her prospects. Priya Ranjan Das Munshi won the 2004 parliamentary poll largely because of the big leads he got from the three Assembly constituencies of Kharba, Ratua and Harischandrapur, all of which are in Malda district and all of which have disappeared from the map of the Raiganj constituency because of delimitation.

If these areas vote for the Congress the way they did last time, it could be Mausam Noor’s gain but Deepa’s loss. She’s also to keep in mind that Priya’s victory margin dropped from 75,000 votes in 1999 to 39,000 in 2004.

Add to all this the potential threat, however small, she faces from Karim Chaudhuri, the former president of the district Trinamul Congress. The popular Muslim leader has considerable influence in Islampur, which, unfortunately for Deepa, has been shifted from the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat to Raiganj because of the delimitation.

And the so-called Muslim factor is a major one in a constituency where Muslims form 47 per cent of the electorate. By comparison, she is less worried about the BJP cutting into her votes, although she agrees the saffron campaign in Darjeeling may have a spillover effect in other constituencies in north Bengal.

But it isn’t just the personal popularity of Karim that is a headache for Deepa. She’s more worried by the “designs” of the players who “have propped up” Karim. “It’s the same design that was behind (Trinamul’s) Joynal Abedin’s candidature against Priyada last time.”

The needle of suspicion points to none other than Mamata Banerjee, with whom Deepa has no love lost. While she doesn’t name Mamata, Deepa is frank enough to put her case on record: “All Trinamul leaders and most of its workers here have gone over to (neighbouring) Balurghat where they have their candidate.”

Her words are borne out by a near-total absence of Mamata’s pictures or Trinamul’s symbol from the poll graffiti not just in Raiganj town but throughout the constituency.

But Trinamul’s desertion is sought to be made up for by Congress leaders Sankar Singh and Andul Mannan joining her campaign. Both these leaders have a score to settle with Trinamul and are leaving nothing to chance in order to help Deepa win.

Despite her problems, she does have a fair chance of winning. But she knows it’s no easy job, despite the emotive exhortations of Priyada’s dream.