The reluctant politician

THE BHADRALOK INTELLECTUAL SPENT DECADES TELLING GOVTS WHAT THEY WERE DOING WAS WRONG. AS WEST BENGAL'S FM, THE NUMBERS ARE HIS PROBLEM

- SHOBHANA SUBRAMANIAN

THERE IS ACERTAIN IRONY in the journey of Swapan Dasgupta. For most of his public life, he was the man with the sharp column and the sharper historical analogy — the bhadralok intellectual who could diagnose Bengal's economic decline with the precision of a surgeon and the detachment of someone who didn't have to fix it.

Today, he is the surgeon. And the patient is on the table.

When Home Minister Amit Shah first floated the idea of Dasgupta actually contesting an election backin 2020, the reaction from the man himself was, by his own admission, something close toalarm.Hewas not wrong to be nervous. He lost the first outing from Tarakeshwar — though only by 7,000 votes.

Most people in his position would have quietly returned to their morning columns in the Times of India and their evenings with a good book. Dasgupta, didn’t. When the BJP announced his candidature for Rashbehari in South Kolkata in this election, he quipped that "conventional wisdom dictated that I was being offered asa sacrificial lamb." Past data justified the anxiety. The constituency had backed the Congress-Trinamul Congress ecosystem since 1982, and the BJP, as Dasgupta put it, "lacked the organisational depth, money, and muscle of the ruling party."