It’s homecoming for a man who left his roots 50 years ago. Veteran journalist-cum-politician, Chandan Mitra, has returned to Hooghly in West Bengal, to contest his first Lok Sabha election on a BJP ticket.
Mitra’s ancestral roots are in Chinsurah, a suburb 60 km from Kolkata, and a part of the Hooghly parliamentary constituency.
A former student of the Auxilium Convent, Mitra’s ties with his
Since then, life has taken him far and wide. Having served in major dailies such as
“I was influenced by Advaniji’s philosophy of cultural nationalism and got very close to him,” he says.
Approximately a decade later in 2003, Mitra was nominated by the party to the Rajya Sabha. But before he was chosen for a second term, Mitra joined the BJP to mark a foray into “active politics” in 2010.
Mitra was keen to shed the tag of an “arm-chair politician.”
“You cannot expect to be in politics and then not fight the elections. That is when people take you seriously,” he told Business Line.
Plans, as he said, were drawn up “rather hurriedly” to take a plunge into “mass-politics” before he turns 60 next year. Ironically in Hooghly, the odds are stacked against him. BJP’s vote share in the constituency was well below 4 per cent in the 2009 general election.
But Mitra is confident that the party would do “significantly” better this time, riding on the “charisma” of Narendra Modi and the anti-incumbency votes against Trinamool.
He has already made his intentions clear by criticising Banerjee for making tall promises to the farmers of Singur.
“I don’t think it is feasible to give back acquired land to farmers,” he said at a recent public meeting and proposed alternative industrial development plans.