Dulal and Kasturi Das have been married for 48 years. They have been councillors for two decades. And they have always contested elections in adjacent wards.
In Maheshtala, the couple are often compared with Laloo Prasad and wife Rabri. And there is a jamai thrown in for good measure.
Kasturi and Dulal are in-laws of mayor Sovan Chatterjee, who, given the Trinamul Congress hierarchy, is also their leader. Chatterjee is the president of Trinamul's South 24-Parganas unit.
"Kasturi and I have always contested elections side by side. In 1994, I was elected councillor from Ward 16. When the seat was reserved for women in 1999, Kasturi became the councillor there," recounted Dulal, 70.
Dulal skipped the 1999 election, but in 2004 and 2009 he and Kasturi were again elected from adjacent wards. This year, Dulal is the Trinamul candidate in Ward 16 and Kasturi is the party's nominee in Ward 17.
When Maheshtala Municipality goes to the polls on Saturday, Dulal will be seeking re-election as its chairman and Kasturi, 62, who is also the local MLA, as a councillor.
The couple is almost assured of victory in the absence of a strong Opposition, say residents of Maheshtala. "They (Trinamul) are losing popularity but they will win. Where is the Opposition?" said Dilip Kumar Bose, who lives in Eden City, Maheshtala.
Jayanta Roy, the manager of a garments shop, said Trinamul would reap the rewards of some positive changes over the past five years. "The roads have improved. The ESI Hospital was a den of drug addicts but Trinamul cleaned up the campus after taking over the board in 2009 and the hospital is running well now."
Maheshtala has a population of 4.5 lakh (2011 census) and an area of 42,721 sq km, less than a fourth of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation's size, but it is growing and developing fast. In the past five years, three large housing complexes have come up along Budge Budge Trunk Road.
The Opposition alleges that infrastructure hasn't grown in tandem with promises and aspirations. A CPM leader accuses Dulal of sharing amenities that belong to Maheshtala with the CMC to please son-in-law Sovan.
"Maheshtala Municipality gets water from the Garden Reach Waterworks. With the CMC taking over the facility, a greater quantity of water is being diverted to Calcutta," said CPM leader Subhasish Majumdar.
He fears there will come a day when Maheshtala is deprived of water to increase supply to the CMC belt.
Elections to Maheshtala Municipality are being held nearly a year later than scheduled. Polling was due in June 2014 but the state government delayed the process on the premise that Maheshtala would soon become part of a new municipal corporation created by merging two municipalities and a few panchayats. The plan didn't materialise.
Dulal, who is confident of victory, has relied mostly on local leaders to run Trinamul's campaign in Maheshtala."If the chief minister has to come here and campaign, what are we there for? It should raise questions about our ability if we can't campaign for ourselves," he said.
The CPM had its state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra campaigning in Maheshtala on Tuesday and Wednesday. Congress leader Adhir Chowdhury too has campaigned in the area.
The adjacent Budge Budge Municipality too will go to the polls on Saturday. Shyampur is the boundary between Maheshtala and Budge Budge, the older of the two civic bodies.
While Maheshtala became a municipality in 1994, Budge Budge Municipality is 115 years old. It spans 9.06sq km and has around a lakh people living in the municipal area.
Budge Budge is also the gateway to rural Bengal, which is why some of its neighbourhoods look more like villages than localities within a town.
