It takes one Didi (elder sister) to tap the potential of two Didis Number One to score big in an election – and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, affectionately called Didi, just did that to add two Lok Sabha seats to her Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) kitty in the 2024 general elections.
Seasoned actor Rachana Banerjee, winner of TMC’s Hooghly seat, is the anchor of the very popular Didi Number One series telecast six days a week on Zee Bangla and, by number of episodes, one of the longest-running Bengali TV series.
It was hosted previously by June Maliah, another senior actor and winner of TMC's Medinipur seat,.
The show captured the imagination of the public as women participants, sometimes from the poorest of families and from the remotest parts of the state, shared life stories of how they overcame adversities, launched small businesses or shone in their careers.
Both sari-clad, slender beauties, the ever-smiling Rachana and doe-eyed Maliah, shared a warm rapport with participants in the show, empathising with those who spoke of their woes and applauding others reporting success in their business ventures.
That connect with people is likely to have translated to voter approval, something CM Mamata Banerjee could have instinctively picked up on while deciding to field them.
General elections 2024 had Rachana and Maliah making their Lok Sabha debut, though the latter won the state assembly elections from Medinipur in 2021, defeating BJP’s Shamit Das and was also a member of the West Bengal Women's Commission.
Both have had their share of controversies.
Rachana, who secured 7,02,744 votes, defeating BJP and fellow actor Locket Chatterjee by 76,853 votes, had Netizens reacting angrily to her Instagram reel in which she pointed to a couple of chimneys belching smoke at a distance, saying “This is our smoke from Hooghly, the smoke I see when I go to work, it’s not from a cigarette, it’s from machines.”
“How can someone, given the conditions in Bengal, make a video like this?” someone asked. Others advised her to check where the smoke was coming from and if there were jobs available there. Pollution was another concern, with people saying it was nothing to joke about.
The debate also touched upon Singur in Hooghly district, Mamata Banerjee’s 'yuddh (war) bhoomi', where she campaigned against acquisition of high-yield farmland that led to changes in land laws and the enactment of The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement (LARR Act), 2013. It cost Singur a Tata Nano project that went into Gujarat’s pocket instead.
Locket Chatterjee also hit back when Rachana, after a meal with a family at Singur, was all praise for the fertile soil there, which she said made grass grow abundantly, leading to good milk yield from cows and wonderful curd.
“Only grass grows there,” Chatterjee said, in an obvious dig at the shutdown of the Nano project as social media went into overdrive with memes aimed at TMC's Hooghly contestant.
Before she defeated BJP’s Agnimitra Paul by 27,191 votes, garnering 7.02 lakh votes to Paul’s 6.75 lakh votes, Maliah got BJP leader Dilip Ghosh, himself no stranger to controversies, all riled up when she demanded a report card from him on his constituency (earlier Ghosh was expected to contest from Medinipur as its sitting MP). She also slammed him for not ensuring wages for workers in his constituency and not providing houses to people under the PM’s Awas Yojana.
Ghosh retaliated with a threat that he would “slap some" people.
During the 2021 Assembly elections Maliah alleged during polling at Medinipur that her name was not visible on some EVMs and tried to enter a few polling booths.
Both actors-TV hosts-turned-politicians, however, are used to melodrama in their reel life, not real, having had long and successful careers in films and television.
Maliah’s movies include The Bong Connection, Hothat Brishti, Har Har Byomkesh and Porobashinee, among others.
Rachana has acted in Bengali, Odia, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada movies, including Paradesi Babu, Kalki Abatar, Ramdhanu the Rainbow, Nayak Nuhen Khalanayan and Neethane Vuntanu. Hindi movie buffs will recognise her as Gauri in Sooryavansham
The presence of the two in Parliament will definitely up the glamour quotient of the August house, with some more spice added to the mix as fellow TMC Lok Sabha member Mahua Moitra makes a triumphant return. She was thrown out unceremoniously last time on an Ethics Committee recommendation for sharing her parliamentary website login credentials and password with a person not authorised to use it.
From quizzing participants in Didi Number One to questioning the government about its programmes and policies – both Rachana and Maliah have certainly come a long way.
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