For 30 years, Bapi Das has run his tea shop on a narrow Bhabanipur lane, stirring kettles, watching governments come and go. When you ask him about the BJP – whether it might throw up a surprise this time – he looks up and offers a parable.

“If I am making tea and I just say how good it is instead of feeding you, why will you believe me?”

Bapi Das has been serving tea in Bhabhanipur for over 30 years.

Bhabanipur goes to the polls on April 29, in the second phase of the West Bengal assembly elections. But this is no ordinary Kolkata seat. It is Mamata Banerjee’s home turf, the ground on which she has chosen to face BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari directly. She has held the seat since 2011, though her most recent path was unconventional: after a narrow loss to Adhikari in Nandigram in May 2021, she returned to her home turf that October to reclaim the seat in a landslide bypoll.

This is a layered constituency – a mixed religious demography with affluent Bengali households and middle-class families sharing the neighbourhood with Gujarati, Marwari, Sikh, Punjabi, and Bihari migrant communities who came here to drive taxis, run shops, and build lives. But days before polling day, there is a weariness. 

A banner of Mamata Banerjee on Elgin Road in Bhabanipur.

Raja Lal Paswan arrived from Bihar before 1980, young and hopeful, to drive taxis in the city. He has been driving for a company in Bhabanipur ever since. He is thinking about retirement now, about going home to Bihar. The Bengal he came to, he says, has fewer opportunities........

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