In Sandeshkhali, ‘it’s not Rekha’s fight alone’

How much difference can a month-and-a-half make? Rekha Patra’s list runs long.

One of the alleged victims of sexual harassment by Trinamool Congress strongmen in Sandeshkhali, she is now the BJP’s candidate for the Lok Sabha elections from the Basirhat seat, among the hottest battlegrounds this poll season in Bengal. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called up Patra, and applauded her as “Shakti Swaroopa (the image of courage)”. The PM choosing to phone her, and to call her Shakti – harking back to the row triggered by Rahul Gandhi’s use of the word – were both significant.

Patra, 31, realises the importance of it. On the campaign trail in a Toto (as an e-rickshaw is called here locally), she says: “I am still in a daze. I never imagined this. Sometimes when the media asks me to say something, I am at a loss for words. But the mothers and sisters are with me.”

With more than two months of campaigning ahead of her (Basirhat votes on June 1), Patra has sent her young daughters to a relative’s home. Her husband Sandip Patra, employed as a labourer in Tamil Nadu, is back home to help her out. For a week, Patra says, all of them lived in an unknown location “for safety”.

Her own home, near Patrapara on the Sandeshkhali island – a semi-pucca two-room house, shared by Sandip and his elder brother Sanjib’s families – is swamped these days with relatives and a sprinkling of BJP workers. A TV set plays constantly in the background.

As she does the round of Sandeshkhali Block 2 with women supporters on foot and BJP leaders packed with her in the small Toto, stopping at temples to offer prayers, sweating in the already humid weather, Patra, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, says: “I worked in other people’s homes to earn a