As BJP, TMC dive deep, Congress bastion Malda sees battle for Muslim votes

It is a three-cornered contest in Malda, one of the last Congress bastions in West Bengal, which goes to polls on Tuesday in the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections, and Muslim votes are likely to settle the fight for the seat.

Muslims form a major chunk of the electorate in both the Maldaha North and the Maldaha South seats, which have stayed with the Congress for almost 40 years, and there is a distinct buzz about the need for a change this time.

And that buzz has created a space, which the BJP and the TMC are vying for.

While the Congress has pitted Isha Khan Choudhury against sitting Congress MP and now TMC nominee Mausam Noor Ghani Khan's nephew and niece respectively from Maldaha North, the BJP has fielded former CPI(M) leader Khagen Murmu in the seat.

In Maldaha South, sitting Congress MP Abu Hasem Khan, Ghani Khan's brother, is contesting against Moazzem Hossain of the TMC and Sreerupa Mitra Choudhury of the BJP.

"How long can we vote for these people who are still using the name of their dead dada (brother), mama (maternal uncle) for votes," Bhaskar Ghosh (22) asked, referring to the family of Ghani Khan Choudhury, the late eight-time MP who won consecutively between 1980 and 2004, followed by his family members in both the constituencies separated by the delimitation in 2009.

For Ghosh, a student who works at a computer repair shop in Kaliachak, the TMC might benefit from the "waning magic of Ghani Khan" in the Maldaha South Lok Sabha seat, where riots had broken out in January 2016 over purported derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad.

However, he agrees with other locals that the riots opened the doors for the BJP to emerge as a key player in the area, leading to the saffron party's surprising win in the assembly seat of Baishnabnagar, which has a Muslim population of around 52 per cent.

"Dalubabu (Abu Hasem Khan, the sitting MP from Maldaha Dakshin) is a spent force here. He comes here only when there is election and forgets about us. All he does when he comes here is talk of Ghani Khan. We don't want to know what they have done for us in the past. We want to know what they can do now," Ghosh added.

"No Hindu vote is going to Dalubabu this time. However, we are the minority here, so he could still win," Ranjan Haldar (29), who runs a business in the area, said.

BJP national secretary and Bengal in-charge Kailash Vijayvarghi, who was in Malda to campaign for Murmu, indicated that the party had made major inroads and was a serious threat to the Congress this time.

"There is now a fervour for the BJP. Our workers have worked tirelessly. The buzz around the party is more than it was in 2014. This politics of appeasement (by ruling TMC in the state) had to end," Vijayvarghi told PTI