Electoral contests are not only about political parties. There is also considerable public interest in the contestants. The publication of the lists of contenders by the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the two principal claimants to Bengal’s political crown, in recent days has, quite understandably, evinced interest. For instance, a clash of titans is expected in Bhowanipore where Mamata Banerjee will battle Suvendu Adhikari. But then even towering personalities are not enough to ensure victory on the electoral turf; strategy, more often than not, trumps personal charisma. The TMC’s chart of lieutenants has attracted attention on this count. As many as 74 sitting MLAs have been dropped while 15 others have been relocated. There has also been a perceptible effort to mix old blood with the new. Thus, the party has chosen to throw into the mix students, teachers, journalists along with its tried-and-tested workhorses. The objective is evident: the TMC wants to beat anti-incumbency, a natural outcome of its years in power, with an emphasis on performance and potential. The new faces, the TMC will be hoping, would also offset the charges of corruption that have dogged Bengal’s ruling party consistently.

The thrust of the TMC’s rivals in terms of their selection of candidates, too, has been contingent on such factors as strategy, the weight of personality, public perception and so on. For instance, the BJP’s decision to field Mr Adhikari against Ms Banerjee on the latter’s home turf — he had beaten her in a controversial contest in Nandigram five years ago — is strategic: the saffron outfit wants to pin the chief minister down to her constituency. Arguably, the BJP’s organisational limitations in this state and the absence of larger-than-life local leaders have forced it to be reliant on an embedded network when it comes to candidate selection. Unlike other states, where the BJP can afford to be more experimental — even adventurous — with its picks, in Bengal, a limited resource pool has forced it to be conventional in terms of choices barring a few exceptions. It must be conceded though that the beauty and the complexity of elections are such that even the best-laid electoral plans of political parties can go awry. The soundness of candidate selection of Bengal’s political parties would be revealed on May 4.