Kolkata: Inside his Mahanirban Road residence on the first polling day of the West Bengal Assembly election 2026, Indian journalist and politician Swapan Dasgupta seemed content with how the elections were proceeding for the BJP.
Dasgupta, 70, is the party’s candidate for the upscale Rashbehari constituency that will vote on 29 April, as part of the second phase of polling. In between frantic calls from party colleagues and cadre, Dasgupta told ThePrint he has a plan to spruce up Rashbehari if voted to power.
“I want to upgrade the infrastructure around the famous Kalighat Temple to Kashi-Kamakhya-Puri-Ujjain standards. And I want to build a Bengal café and culture district from Hindustan Park to Jodhpur Park, putting it on the tourist map,” Dasgupta said.
Of Kali and cafes
As a South Kolkata boy, Rashbehari is an area Dasgupta knows intimately, having grown up in the region. He said that it has been easy for him with connect to its mostly upper-middle-class voters. “Some people know me because I appear quite often on television. Some people know me because I write. Others know me by reputation or because they were in school with me,” he said.
But Dasgupta has not restricted himself only to the genteel set. He has been doing regular rounds of the shanty towns that fall in his constituency.
“It’s important to point out that in a city like Kolkata, there is often an impression that you are there also to help clean the drains, which is the responsibility of the corporators or the representatives of the municipal corporation. That’s their job,” the former Rajya Sabha member said.
But it is during his campaigns in such areas that Dasgupta told ThePrint he sensed a silent but emphatic need among the people for change.
“There are sections of the middle classes who are quite open in their dislike of the Trinamool Congress government and who want change. But if you go to the poorer areas, you’ll be greeted with smiles rather than expressions of support. But that smile is itself very evocative,” he added.
“Sometimes, you have to identify their political preferences through their smiles. What is the meaning of that smile? Or when they raise their hand and wave back at you. The voters may be silent, but they are determined to bring in change,” he said.
For his constituency, Dasgupta has singled out a few plans. The big one involves the famous Kalighat temple. One of the most important Shakti Peeths (51 sacred Hindu shrines dedicated to Goddess Shakti), he said, the temple is comparable in scale to all the other major religious towns of India.
“Imagine the infrastructural developments that have taken place in places like Varanasi, Ujjain, Puri and Kamakhya, and compare that to what has happened to Kalighat, which is still in many ways like it was in the nineteenth century with the Adi Ganga, which the British, in their wisdom, decided to call Tolly’s Nala,” Dasgupta said.
He added how disturbed he is by the flooding that happens around the temple area and emphasised the lack of infrastructure for pilgrims who come to visit the temple in lakhs.
“Unlike in other big temples, the locals are not beneficiaries of Kalighat. So, there is a plan to rejuvenate the Adi Ganga, upgrade the pilgrim rest areas, hotel and hygienic facilities, and bring in business opportunities for locals,” he said.
Dasgupta also plans to build a café district stretching from Hindustan Park to Jodhpur Park.
“There are some lovely old houses here that have been put to good use by setting up cafes. Thank god, they haven’t been demolished. I want to give it a formal shape to this, encourage local entrepreneurs, have a modicum of regulation so that, you know, you can do away with the problems of parking, the problems of drug abuse, and strengthen women’s safety,” he said.
Dasgupta said if it gets recognition as Bengal’s café and cultural district, the place would get a boost through tourism, and provide employment to locals.
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Dadas, violence, and risks
Dasgupta shared that there are risks involved in opposing the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, even in a city like Kolkata.
“I recently came across two examples. One is a young boy from the slums who was called by the Trinamool ‘dadas’ to appear at the local party office. Why? What was his crime? He had posted photographs of himself participating in a Ram Navami rally,” Dasgupta said.
Ram Navami rallies have become a flashpoint between the ruling TMC and the opposition BJP over display of weapons, procession routes and sporadic incidents of violence. The number of participants in these rallies have grown substantially over the year coinciding with the rise of BJP in the state.
The other example, Dasgupta said, is of someone who benefits from this 100-day work scheme, which used to be called the MNREGA and is “called something else now”.
“He was taken off the roster for over twenty-five days. His crime? He had gone to PM Modi’s Brigade Parade ground rally,” he said.
Dasgupta also gave the example of three local shopkeepers whose shops have been closed because they refused to pay a particular sum, which the local Trinamool dadas demanded as hafta (weekly protection).
“This is the level of intimidation and violence here. And then there is the memory of the horrors of the 2021 post-poll violence when the BJP lost the elections to the Trinamool Congress,” Dasgupta said, adding he is not surprised that expressions of political preference are very understated this time.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a US-based conflict-monitoring organisation, shows that West Bengal has recorded more election-related violence than any other Indian state in the past six years. The 2021 elections in the state were the bloodiest in the dataset — 300 violence events and 58 deaths.
But in all this, Dasgupta plans to end the menace he likes to call the “Syndicate Raj”.
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Battling syndicate, building narrative
Dasgupta said that the mafia under the patronage of the ruling dispensation in West Bengal controls everything, from the Kalighat temple to real estate transactions and parking.
“This mafia has to be taken care of, and their political influence, their social influence, their economic role must end forthright. That is my basic approach to the Rajbari constituency. It’s an emotional commitment to an area where I grew up, where my family has lived for over three to four generations, and which I feel very strongly for,” he said.
Calling out the “syndicate system,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his election speech has promised to replace it with transparency and strict enforcement of the law. Modi announced that a BJP government would release a detailed white paper on corruption and set up a high-level probe into political violence in the state.
Dasgupta does not make much of the narrative in which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seems to have embroiled the BJP, with the latter having to prove that if it comes to power in the state, it won’t ban the non-vegetarian food, including fish.
“I’ll put this in context. After 15 years, you would’ve expected the Trinamool Congress to have gone to the electorate saying, ‘Look, this is what we’ve done, and this is what we aim to do.’ We should have gone to the electorate on the other hand and said: ‘This is our critique of the Trinamool Congress, and this is our alternative.’ That’s standard traditional good election,” Dasgupta said.
Instead, Dasgupta pointed out, the TMC’s foremost issue is whether BJP leaders eat fish and meat.
“Are you wearing a sari? Are you wearing salwar-kameez? Stuff like this, which has no value whatsoever. Now, I am not going to explain my Bengali-ana (Bengali-ness) to Mamata Banerjee. I might feel that she’s not really kosher. But she’s as much Bengali as I, but we’re not cut from the same cloth,” Dasgupta said.
He also vehemently disagreed with TMC leader Mahua Moitra’s assertion that those who don’t support her party are not Bengalis.
During a protest over the SIR issue at Dharmatala in Kolkata last month, Moitra had said: “I am saying this to everyone that those who are not with TMC now are not Bengalis. They don’t have the right to stay in Bengal because Mamata Didi is fighting this battle for the people of Bengal.”
He said that this way, somebody could simply turn around and say, if one doesn’t marry a Bengali, one is not a Bengali. “Now I won’t say it to Mahua because the person she has married is a very dear friend of mine, and he happens to be an Odia,” Dasgupta said.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)