Bengal

TMC stars pocket ghatal, midnapore

• The Statesman
• 17 May 2014

dev wins with a whooping margin against santosh rana
Biswabrata Goswami
biswabrata@thestatesman.net
Midnapore, 16 May
As the electoral battle in both the Midnapore and Ghatal parliamentary constituencies were tilted towards stardom, the Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee's, star candidates,-  Dipak Adhikari (Dev) and Sandhya Roy won with whopping margins against their Left front candidates.
The contest in both the constituencies, though, was of truly fabled proportions, between novices and politically matured communist leaders.
Mrs Sandhya Roy, one of the leading ladies of Bengali cinema in the 1960s and a first-time candidate defeated the CPI candidate Mr Prabodh Panda with a margin of more than 1.8 lakhs votes. The CPI candidate's fate has been viewed particularly as tragic as the seat was represented by legendary parliamentarian and Marxist ideologue Indrajit Gupta for seven terms between 1980 and 1999.
Dev, a Tollywood star, on the other hand, managed an entry into political arena by defeating the CPI candidate Santosh Rana from Ghatal which is known as the stronghold of the Left for the past few decades.
Many political observers felt that fielding star candidates in the Left-dominated constituencies would stopped the winning run of the Left and this came true for these two constituencies where Ms Banerjee used the two celebrities as her trump cards.
In East Midnapore, the Adhikari dynasty continued its winning ways in the electoral battle where the veteran Trinamul Congress leader Sisir Adhikari from Kanthi constituency has defeated his close contestant Mr Tapas Sinha, a CPI-M candidate with a huge margin. Mr Sinha, a young candidate of the Left Front failed to make any crack in the Adhikari dynasty as he could not earn the faiths of the common people.
Like Mr Sinha, another young CPI-M candidate Sheikh Ibrahim Ali also failed to make any meaningful inroad on Mr Adhikari's son Subhendu's vote bank. Subhendu underscored his clear sweep in the constituency with a margin of more than 1.3 lakhs votes.
The victory of Subhendu Adhikari, a prime architect of the anti-land acquisition movement in Nandigram in 2007, came to a certain point on 27 March - the day former CPI-M MP and Haldia strongman Lakshman Seth was expelled from the party.
The main Opposition - the Left Front - had been in disarray in the district for the past few years, which got compounded since the expulsion of Mr Seth.