In West Bengal’s election season, candidates are discovering that the quickest way to a voter’s mind may well be through the elector’s kitchen, courtyard and tubewell, as speeches give way to spatulas and manifestos to water buckets in a new politics of intimacy.
One candidate washed utensils in a village home, while another carried buckets of water for an elderly woman, and the third shaved a voter at a roadside saloon.
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Across the state, the campaign trail has become less a contest of speeches and more a competition in political intimacy, with every candidate trying to send the same message: “I am not above you, I am one among you”.
In Hooghly’s Goghat, TMC candidate Nirmal Maji, a Kolkata resident, seems determined not to let the familiar “outsider” taunt become a political liability.
