Once upon a time, Indira Gandhi requested Satyajit Ray to make a documentary on her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. The trio needs no introduction. Anyway, Ray flatly refused. He bluntly told Gandhi: “No, because I am not interested.” She took Ray’s ‘no’ graciously. She was not vindictive – and she certainly did not nag and pester him to change his mind. Ray later explained that he was not interested because it was too early to make a film on the country’s first Prime Minister; he genuinely believed that it would take a few decades for all the blind adulation to subside and allow any objective assessment of Nehru to emerge.
Cut to present-day West Bengal and one can’t help but notice that the political class and the film fraternity are not only hobnobbing but are entangled in a full-blooded affair. The liaison is evident from the sheer number of actors fielded by the Trinamool Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party; especially the former; in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections for 42 seats.
Out of nine film stars in the poll fray, six have been fielded by the Trinamool Congress and three by the BJP.
The most conspicuous is Tollywood star Deepak Adhikari, popularly known as Dev, contesting from Ghatal on a Trinamool Congress ticket. The 41-year-old won from Ghatal in 2014, when he made his electoral debut, and in 2019. He is not only on a hat trick but is the second biggest crowd-puller in the Trinamool Congress after Mamata Banerjee, easily eclipsing the chief minister’s heir-apparent, Abhishek Banerjee’s appeal in the parliamentary election season. It’s no secret that crowds spontaneously throng Dev’s rallies but election managers have to slog to ensure a big turnout at Abhishek’s programmes.
Big Names Include Mithun and Shatrughan Sinha
Dev’s pre-eminence is clear from the fact that the Trinamool Congress has hired a helicopter to ferry him across the length and breadth of the state for campaigning in the seven-phase polls. The film star addresses election rallies with amazing chutzpah making him a big asset for his party; Dev holds forth on economics, development and secularism with equal aplomb underlining his political maturity acquired through hard work. To counter his charisma, the BJP has fielded actor Hiranmoy Chattopadhyay, who happens to be the saffron party’s MLA from Kharagpur. But Hiranmoy, who crossed over from the Trinamool Congress to the BJP, is no match for Dev in the battle for Ghatal raging 120 km away from Kolkata.
The BJP’s star campaigner today is Mithun Chakraborty, but he is not a candidate in this election. He too travels by helicopter to canvas for votes. The Trinamool Congress has fielded another film personality, Rachna Banerjee who is a popular actress and the host of a Bengali TV reality show, from the Hooghly seat which is currently represented by the BJP’s Locket Chatterjee, who is also from the entertainment industry. Chatterjee is however on a slippery wicket as all the assembly segments of the Hooghly Lok Sabha constituency, which she won in 2019 are now represented by the Trinamool Congress, giving debutante Rachna, a former Miss Calcutta, a head start over Locket who is tipped to lose.
Two other Trinamool Congress star candidates, Shatrughan Sinha and Satabdi Roy, are eyeing their second and fourth term from Asansole and Birbhum, respectively. Both appear to be comfortably placed according to field reports. Mamata’s party has also fielded actors-turned-politicians, Sayoni Ghosh and June Maliah, from Jadavpur and Medinipur illustrating its reliance on the tinsel town for mass mobilisation. Maliah is locking horns with Agnimitra Paul, a glamourous fashion designer and sitting BJP MLA.
Significantly, Mamata dropped two young sitting actress MPs, Nusrat Jahan and Mimi Chakraborty, this time for varying reasons. But the duo’s big contribution to the Trinamool Congress in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is a matter of record and can’t be glossed over simply because they were not renominated or chose not to contest. In 2014, the Trinamool Congress won the Jadavpur and Basirhat seats by a margin of just under 1,30,000 votes. But in 2019, Nusrat won from Basirhat by 3,50,369 votes while Mimi’s victory margin was 2,95,239 votes. Nusrat had the second-highest victory margin in West Bengal and Mimi’s was the fifth-highest, underlining their popularity among the electorate despite being political greenhorns.
Importantly, Mamata has an excellent rapport with the Bengali entertainment industry and is known to handpick showbiz personalities for parliamentary and assembly elections. Serials telecast in the afternoon and evening are recorded by Mamata’s staff so that she can watch them late at night after a hard day’s work. Her interest in showbiz is of course not confined to Tollywood given her close personal ties with Bollywood’s Shahrukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha.
But Bengal’s political culture is very different from South India’s where film personalities like N. T. Rama Rao, M. G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha and M. Karunanidhi – a prolific scriptwriter of Tamil cinema – rose to become the CM. None of Mamata’s predecessors are from the film industry and there is no likelihood of anyone from showbiz occupying her chair even in the distant future.
(SNM Abdi is a distinguished journalist and ex-Deputy Editor of Outlook. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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