For Somen Mitra, the battle for Diamond Harbour LS constituency is a battle for political survival. Once close to Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, the former president of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee left the party in July last year to float his own party, the Progressive Indira Congress. He has now joined hands with Mamata Banerjee and is contesting on a Trinamool Congress ticket.

It is Mitra’s first time in Diamond Harbour where he is pitted against sitting four-time MP Shamik Lahiri of the CPI(M). In a constituency where the defining theme — as elsewhere in Bengal — has become the tussle between farmland and industry, Lahiri had defeated Sougata Roy of the Trinamool Congress by a thumping margin of 130,000 votes in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.

This time, the challenge may be greater for him. Mitra may have left the Congress after differences with the leadership, but the fact that the party is a Trinamool ally and that workers still hold him in some regard gives him extra muscle. “People know why I had to leave the party after serving it for so many years. I have made a new beginning. The only thing in my mind is to represent the people of Diamond Harbour,” asserts Mitra. An able organiser, he has already convinced a section of Congress workers to campaign for him.

But his opponent is using the outsider card against Mitra. Lahiri says he is optimistic about winning the seat for the fifth consecutive time. “Mitra is an outsider. No one knows him here in Diamond Harbour,” says Lahiri. Locals say the sitting MP has been able to win back a section of party workers who left the CPI(M) during the last panchayat elections. “So what if we had bad results in panchayat elections? People are coming back to us. But Trinamool is using violence and muscle power, which we have to combat,” Lahiri adds.

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