"Rs 15,000 for a five-star lifestyle," screams a poster advertising a housing project from atop a lamppost as a procession of weather-beaten faces walks out of a jute mill, one of the few still operating along BT Road, to the accompaniment of the evening siren.

A few metres ahead, a billboard invites you to "Live your wishes". The backdrop depicts rows of highrises around a water body.

The billboards depicting a feel-good ambience are deceptive. They belie the tension in this industrial backyard of Bengal, some 25km from Calcutta, because of a battle within the ruling Trinamul Congress.

A section of Trinamul insiders has floated a platform, the Trinamul Bachao Committee, to fight those within the party who have been allegedly patronising the all-powerful lobby of realtors in this region of industrial barrenness.

It is an uneven fight. By all indications, Trinamul is set to stage a comeback in the three municipal bodies of Barrackpore, Titagarh and Khardah.

But the Trinamul Banchao Committee, with two leaves as its symbol, has managed to scratch the underbelly of real-estate growth and the allegedly disproportionate rise in income of some of the councillors in all three boards.

"Prices of flats have shot up from around Rs 2,000 to Rs 3,000 per sq ft within two years across Anandapuri, Bidhan Pally and GR Road in Barrackpore," rued Pradip Ghosh, one of the Trinamul councillors who have been denied tickets to contest the election.

"We wanted the municipality to set up a building committee with representatives of all parties. In return, the ruling body sidelined us, strangling any voice of dissent," he told Metro, explaining why he didn't make the cut this time.

Pradip said he and 14 other Trinamul councillors in Barrackpore were trying to fight rampant corruption over changing the nature of land use to help realtors.

"Sunil Karan, a young Trinamul worker, was shot dead in January because he had come in the way of developers who were filling up a huge water body in Ruia, bordering Khardah and Barrackpore," said Milan Krishna Ash, one of the councillors contesting the polls under the banner of the Trinamul Banchao Committee.

For any civic election, the usual poll planks are availability of drinking water, drainage, lights and sewerage. More so in this part of Bengal north of Calcutta, where a large section of the people comprises migrant mill workers who had settled here in the Seventies for jobs in jute mills and textile and paper factories along the banks of the Hooghly.

Some of the jute mills, including the Khardah, Kinnison and Alexandra jute mills, have long been shut. Kankinara Paper Mills doesn't operate anymore either. A few of the textile factories such as Mahalaxmi Cotton and Lakkhi Cotton that used to hire workers in shifts have closed too. Their chimneys don't spew smoke anymore.

The only gainful activity in parts of Barrackpore and neighbouring Titagarh and Khardah - all three municipalities go to the polls on April 25 - is real estate.

The influence of the developers' lobby has been so overwhelming - evidently for the returns involved - that it has left the ruling Trinamul a divided house. The contrast with the Eighties and the Nineties - when the Left Front was in power - is hard to miss.

"The Left used to command the area because they had the labour unions in the industrial units under their control. Today, the Trinamul is divided as the party's leaders want to control all activities around real estate projects," said a retired professor who used to teach at Rahara Vivekananda Centenary College.

The ruling party stands to gain from real estate in several ways - from sanctioning project plans to charging specific fees for various civic amenities. Besides, the ruling party also controls the syndicates, which act as monopoly suppliers of building materials to these projects.

Given their grip on realty, the ruling party leaders also enjoy the power to distribute favours to jobless youths, who in turn become the foot soldiers of these leaders.

On paper, the arrangement looks fine but problems crop up as the pool of leaders continues to grow, resulting in an exponential growth in the number of benefit seekers. And when expectations are not fulfilled, competition among the leaders for a share of the spoils spills out into the open.

Take Khardah, where three prominent Trinamul leaders - municipality chairperson Tapas Paul, Trinamul's district general secretary Kajol Sinha and councillor Sukantha Banik - are contesting the elections amid the buzz that all of them want to be chairperson.

Trinamul sources said the party's top brass was aware of the contest among local leaders and allegations of realtors flouting rules and that's why nobody had been projected as the chairperson. "I have always been an organisational man, but this time the party wanted me to contest and so I am in the fray," Sinha said.

Though Sinha, a close aide of Jyotipriya Mullick, district president of the party, is billed as the frontrunner for the post of chairperson, Paul has made it clear to his aides that it wouldn't be possible for him to function unless he headed the civic board.

CPM leaders in Khardah are aware of the aspirations and are hoping against hope that the fight within the Trinamul would help them get a few seats in the municipality, which was a red bastion until a few years ago.

The fight within Trinamul is clear in Titagarh too, where Manish Shukla, the youth leader with several criminal cases pending against him, is contesting as an Independent. "It's all about contractors and promoters here. The ruling Trinamul is so engrossed in making money that it will not tolerate any hurdle or hear any voice of dissent," said Shukla, a prominent member of the Trinamul Banchao Committee.

Though all the dissidents claim that they want to control unbridled real estate growth, which has resulted in criminalisation of the area, it is common knowledge across the three municipalities that the fight is all about who gets to control realty.

"The dissidents are talking about saving Trinamul and the ruling party is promising more affordable housing in the name of real estate growth. But none of them is talking about saving industry or ensuring peace.... That's the tragedy," said an employee of CESC, which has a power plant in Titagarh.