Articles by Sibendu Das

In 2009, Dr Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar came to power on a Trinamool Congress ticket from the Barasat Lok Sabha constituency near Kolkata. Since then the 60-year-old physician has retained her MP seat, winning by a margin of 1,73,141 votes in the 2014 General Elections. The incumbent MP is in the poll fray again from Barasat. Parliamentary constituency No. 17, Barasat, saw a change in its constituent assembly segments in the 2009 elections, following the orders of the Delimitation Commission; as per these orders, the satellite township of New Town, which has been developed as a special urban IT and corporate…

One of the most prestigious constituencies of Kolkata, Jadavpur has always seen parties fielding popular leaders and party heavyweights for this Lok Sabha constituency. This was the very place from where the current West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee defeated Somnath Chatterjee,  stalwart of the CPI(M), in 1984. Indeed, the constituency has seen many high profile and celebrated MPs, the most recent being Harvard historian Sugato Bose, who won the seat in 2014. In the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Mamata Banerjee surprised everyone by declaring that local Tollywood star, Mimi Chakraborty would get the much coveted…

On a sweltering Saturday afternoon, a little more than a dozen men, armed with red flags in hand, towing a middle-aged lady with inconspicuous features quietly walk into a gated housing society in the heart of Kasba, a densely populated residential neighbourhood in East Kolkata. Minutes later, the residents hear a firm female voice that promises a better tomorrow devoid of anarchy and lumpen raj. A face here and a face there, slowly but gradually curious onlookers from windows and balconies start peeping down to catch the show. The lady, with a microphone in one hand (one of her party…