Final round polling begins in TMC's comfort zone

KOLKATA: The Election Commission would not have bothered about such niceties while chalking out the schedule for Bengal's longest polling season. But, in an irony that would not escape anyone, least of all the Trinamool or the CPM, the last day of the six-phase, seven-round, 32day Bengal poll includes the constituency that scripted Scene I, Act I of one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the country's electoral history: Nandigram.

This seat, the celebrities who descended on this place 131 km from Kolkata on March 14, 2007 -and the twists and turns they have gone through in the nine years since 14 people were gunned down for resisting takeover of agricultural land -represent, in a microcosm, Bengal politics' tense present.

Nandigram and East Midnapore, the Trinamool would hope, continue to represent politics, at least, in rural Bengal if not the state's urban pockets. For, this district may still be the easiest for the ruling party -even during these apparently troubled times -and the seat itself may afford it a degree of comfort that it hasn't encountered at too many places this season. If the opposition alliance is at its weakest anywhere, it is East Midnapore. An added cushion for the Trinamool is the absence of the BJP , whose presence in quite a few zones can add just that degree of unpredictability to a contest that analysts love and established politicians hate.

But, if Nandigram's and East Midnapore's rural politics gives Mamata Banerjee and her party a degree of comfort, the urban rub-off has been nightmarish for the Trinamool. “Amar naam, tomar naam, Nandigram“, which gave the urban, Leftleaning intelligentsia a moral counterweight to Left politics' “amar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam“ for a few fleeting years, has now given way to an urban disenchantment with the Trinamool. Few of those, who trudged to Nandigram to see for themselves the level of violence wreaked on villagers by the CPM cadre, can be seen under the Trinamool flag now.

The nine seats in Cooch Behar in the state's northern extreme add their element of intrigue to the last round of elections; the import of these nine seats goes beyond their numerical significance and would, hopefully for the ruling party , give it a pan-Bengal presence if the other North Bengal districts choose to look the other way . The Trinamool holds a majority of the seats here -and has succeeded in weaning away an opposition MLA whose dad, the Forward Bloc's Kamal Guha, used to be the Left Front's bulwark in Cooch Behar -but the chief minister' camping in North Bengal during polling there could point to a growing unease with the situation in the rest of the state.

Mamata Banerjee has been her party's star campaigner and she may want a few days of respite from the heat and dust of Kolkata but her political opponents would like to see in her move a tacit acknowledgement of what they have been saying: that things have changed since Bengal started voting on April 4 and that the fight has become much closer and more difficult to predict than it was barely a month ago.