In Bengal Lok Sabha battle, it’s Mamata who seems to be battling anti-incumbency, not Modi

A FARMER IN his 60s, Ziyarul Haq is sitting this hot May afternoon at Beraberi in Singur, reading the Bengali-language Left mouthpiece newspaper Ganashakti. “Aamra ekhane shilpo chai (We want industry here),” he looks up to say. “My son went for a job interview near Howrah, and the moment they saw in his biodata that he belonged to Singur, they asked him to leave… That has become our reputation, our curse.”

About half-a-kilometre away, another farmer, Rabindra Sadra, echoes Haq, “If there was industry, that would have meant jobs for our children.”

Singur, of course, was to be the site of the Tata Nano plant, which never came to be thanks to an agitation led by Mamata Banerjee, who rode the movement’s momentum to power. While the site lies bare now, there is a chemical factory just opposite.

Across Hooghly, West Medinipur and Bankura districts in West Bengal, this absence of jobs has framed the Lok Sabha elections as an interesting battle: that between Mamata Banerjee’s 13-year-rule vs Narendra Modi’s 10 years. And while it is a Lok Sabha election, the burden of incumbency is on Mamata’s Trinamool Congress government in the state – and not Modi’s at the Centre.

There are the positives, such as the TMC’s marquee ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ scheme – involving Rs 1,000 to 1,200 monthly payments to women above 25 years of age in the state – which has all-round support. Rupsa, a teacher at the Anandapur Boys’ Primary School in Medinipur, says, “Earlier, women had to ask for money from their husbands, now they can spend it pretty much the way they like.”

However, the shadow of corruption permeates all aspects of the TMC government, which has been hit by a series of embarrassing scandals. The party has dubbed them witch-hunting by the Centre.