Mimi Chakraborty Is Fighting From TMC Bastion In Kolkata's Jadavpur

Bengali actor Mimi Chakrabarty is making her electoral debut in the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections on a Trinamool Congress ticket.

Chakrabarty is contesting from Kolkata’s Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat and is up against CPI(M)’s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya and BJP’s Anupam Hazra.

Jadavpur, in south Kolkata, has been a TMC stronghold since 1996. Mamata herself was an MP from the seat, between 1984 and1989, when she was part of the Congress. Before that the seat was a Left bastion held by CPI(M)’s Somnath Chatterjee. 

Mimi became a household name in Bengal after playing Pupe in the Bengali TV show Gaaner Oparey. She made her film debut in 2012 with Baapi Bari Ja.

While her candidature has been questioned by many because of her lack of experience as a politician, she has said that experience did not matter when there was a will to work for people. 

“I prefer to talk less and work more. There are some people who have been saying I don’t have experience in politics. I want to make it clear if you want to work for people, you don’t really need experience. I have the blessings of Mamata Banerjee to contest the elections,” she told The Telegraph.  

If one goes by history, there may be a sliver of truth in Chakrabarty’s remarks. Kabir Suman, a Bengali singer, had managed to win from Jadavpur in 2009 without prior experience in politics. 

Chakrabarty and her fellow actor-turned politician TMC candidate Nusrat Jahan have been at the receiving end of much social media hatred. In the most recent incident, she was trolled for wishing people on the occasion of Ramzan on Twitter.

But Chakrabarty said that she was immune to all of it since she had been a public figure for a while. “As film actors, we are exposed to public scrutiny all the time. Not all of them are about adulation. Also, women politicians are always targeted more than men,” she told The Indian Express.