Popular Movie Star To Take On Modi’s BJP in India’s Asansol

Each day, Bloomberg journalists take you across a selection of towns and cities as they gear up for the big vote.

Hello, I’m Debjit Chakraborty. I oversee Bloomberg News in New Delhi but I grew up in Asansol, one of the top industrial cities in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Dotted with coal mines and colonial era steel mills, the city is a melting pot of people from across the country, who throng to the place in search of a livelihood. However, the industrial boom also brought with it challenges such as pollution and land subsidence caused by underground mining. A large Hindi-speaking migrant population from the neighboring states of Jharkhand and Bihar helped Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right wing Bharatiya Janata Party win the former Communist-party bastion of Asansol in 2014 and 2019. However, BJP lost the by-election after its lawmaker defected in 2021 to firebrand Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party. Its current candidate is yesteryear movie star Shatrughan Sinha.