In 2009 and 2014, the Calcutta North seat sent Sudip Bandyopadhyay to Parliament. Sudip’s adversary that year was the CPM’s Mohammad Salim, not the BJP’s Tathagata Roy, who got a 4 per cent vote share.

In 2014, the BJP fielded Rahul Sinha, a former state unit chief. He lost, but the vote share zoomed by 20 per cent.

On May 14, in the Calcutta north seat, saffron-clad vandals holding BJP flags smashed a bust of one of Bengal’s most respected reformers, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. All this happened when BJP chief Amit Shah, with Sinha by his side, was allegedly holding a march on the street where the vandalism happened.