Congress may announce Bengal poll candidates in phases.
Congress rules out any electoral alliance with Trinamool Congress for the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections.
The train from Howrah to New Delhi leaves at 8:15 p.m., and Suvankar Sarkar is on it, watching the lights of Kolkata fade into the dark Bengal countryside. His phone buzzes continuously, messages from district presidents, block-level workers, local leaders who have spent years waiting for this moment. He answers none of them. Not yet. Tonight, he needs to think.
That sounds important. It sounds like power and strategy and boardroom decisions. But right now, sitting in a moving train with a folder of names on my lap, I feel like nothing so much as a postman carrying other people’s dreams.
The folder is thick. Two hundred and ninety-four constituencies. Two hundred and ninety-four stories. Two hundred and ninety-four men and women who believe that their name on a piece of paper will change everything.
Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s name is near the top. I don’t need to look. I know it by heart. Adhir da has been in this fight for decades, five times to Lok Sabha, years as state president, a man who has bled Congress blue through elections won and lost, through alliances made and broken. He is 68 now, with the kind of tired eyes that come from too many campaigns and too few victories. But when I called him yesterday to tell him his name was being considered, his voice still carried that old fire.
“Beta,” he said, “I will fight wherever the party wants me to fight. You know that.”
I know that. I know that Adhir da will stand on a dusty platform in Baharampur and speak for an hour without notes, his voice cracking with passion, his hands gesturing at the sky. I know that the people there will listen, because they have been listening to him for forty years. I know that some of them will vote for him, and some will vote against him, and some will stay home because they have stopped believing that votes matter.
But I also know that Adhir da’s wife will worry. I know that his grandchildren will ask why Nana has to be gone so much. I know that victory, if it comes, will taste like exhaustion, and defeat will taste like something worse.
Mausam Benazir Noor’s file is thicker than most. It has to be. She has lived two political lives already, first in Trinamool, then in Congress, then back again. When she quit the Rajya Sabha and rejoined us, the news channels went crazy. “Drama,” they called it.
“Do you think they’ll trust me?” she asked. “The workers, I mean. Do you think they’ll believe I’m here to stay?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. Politics is a cruel business. It eats loyalty and spits out suspicion. Mausam is young, talented, connected. The party needs people like her. But the party also needs time, and time is the one thing we never have enough of.
The train rattles through a small station, and I see a man on the platform, maybe 60 years old, sitting on a bench with a tea cup, staring at nothing. He could be a Congress worker from some district, one of the thousands who have kept the flag flying through years of nothing. No tickets, no positions, no power. Just faith. Just stubborn, unreasonable faith that someday, things would change.
That man is why I’m on this train.
The high command in Delhi has its own ideas, its own calculations, its own priorities. They see Bengal as one piece on a very large board. They talk about national strategy and vote share percentages and winnability indexes. They don’t know that in Contai, our block president cycles 15 kilometers every day just to talk to five people. They don’t know that in Malda, a woman named Rina has been running a Congress office out of her front room for twelve years, no salary, no recognition, because her father did it before her and she can’t imagine stopping.
This time, they said, we will listen to the WBPCC. This time, you decide. So I collected the suggestions from every district committee, every block-level meeting, every whispered conversation in tea stalls and party offices. I filled this folder with names, and behind each name is a story I cannot fully tell.
The boy in Bankura whose father was a Congress worker and died without ever seeing the party win. The teacher in Cooch Behar who takes leave without pay to campaign because she believes in something larger than herself. The retired policeman in Howrah who still attends every rally, standing at the back, his spine straight, his faith intact.
They are all in this folder. And tonight, in Delhi, I will try to make the high command see them.
The train speeds on. Outside, Bengal is dark and quiet, villages sleeping, fields waiting for morning. Somewhere out there, a hundred candidates are also waiting, hoping, preparing speeches they may never give.
My phone buzzes again. This time, I look. It’s my daughter. “Baba, when will you be home?”
Not soon, I want to say. Not soon.
But I type back: “A few days. Love you.”
Then I turn back to the folder, and I keep reading.