Tollygunge test: Can 'Messi' Biswas dribble past dual challenge on home turf?
Telegraph | 29 April 2026
“Messi” Biswas must dodge a professor and an alumna of Jadavpur University to score a goal on his home turf.
Can he? May 4 will tell.
Aroop Biswas, a senior Trinamool leader and minister who has represented the Tollygunge Assembly seat since 2006, is up against a resurgent BJP and an optimistic CPM.
Drainage, drinking water and the entertainment industry are major electoral issues, but compounding the challenge for Biswas is the Messi fiasco of December 13, 2025.
On that day, Calcutta’s dream date with Lionel Messi turned into a show of shame featuring a visibly annoyed football icon, ringed by a swarm of officials and wannabe celebrities, and angry high-paying spectators who erupted in vandalism after being denied even a glimpse of the star.
Biswas, then the sports minister, remained glued to Messi for much of the 22 minutes the Argentine wizard spent on the pitch.
Social media was abuzz with pointed questions on why Biswas should be spared when the chief organiser of the event had been arrested. Memes featuring Biswas’s life-size image against the official backdrop of Messi’s GOAT India Tour flooded the Internet. Soon after, Biswas resigned as sports minister.
“Considering how short-lived public memory is, five months is a long time,” said a Trinamool insider. “So many things have happened since then. People would not remember the Messi fiasco while voting.”
A 34-year-old voter in Tollygunge is not one of them. On December 16, he took his football-loving and Messi-worshipping nephew to Salt Lake Stadium. The mayhem left the 12-year-old crying as he left the venue.
“It was not an isolated incident. The Messi mess mirrored many ills plaguing Bengal, the VIP culture included,” the uncle, who asked not to be named, told this newspaper.
Aditya Guha, 34, a voter in Kudghat, Tollygunge, has a different opinion. “During Biswas’s tenure, many playgrounds got a facelift. His office distributes football match tickets, including prized derby tickets, to every registered club in Tollygunge. Aroop Biswas is connected to people and won’t be judged by one debacle,” said Guha, a human resource professional in a multinational company.
Local issues
Partha Pratim Biswas, a professor in the department of construction engineering at Jadavpur University and the CPM candidate from Tollygunge, was visiting gated communities for informal interactions with residents when this reporter met him on Saturday.
Drinking water and drainage emerged as the key talking points.
“We don’t get water from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. We depend on a pump to extract groundwater, which is treated before reaching individual apartments that also have water purifiers. The quarterly electric bill, which residents must share, runs up to around ₹60,000. We have been trying to get water from the civic body for years now, but in vain,” said Partha Roy, an elderly resident.
Another resident of an adjacent housing complex complained about waterlogging. A person in Netaji Nagar, also in Tollygunge, was electrocuted after heavy rain lashed the city in September 2025.
The CPM candidate was also asked about the Trinamool-BJP binary in Bengal.
“We have to break that binary. All of you have seen what happened last time. The BJP candidate from Tollygunge in 2021 is the outgoing Trinamool MLA of Ballygunge,” he told voters.
In 2021, singer-politician Babul Supriyo contested from Tollygunge on a BJP ticket. He lost and joined Trinamool and got elected from Ballygunge in a bypoll.
At the heart of Partha Pratim’s appeal to voters is poll arithmetic. Tollygunge had around 2.58 lakh voters, spread across nine wards, in 2021. The SIR has removed only a small fraction of the electors.
The CPM had a sizeable support base in Tollygunge, according to the results of both the 2016 state polls and the 2019 general election. But in 2021, a sizeable chunk of the Left vote went to the BJP, which finished second.
In 2016, Biswas had polled around 90,500 votes, which translated to a vote share of nearly 47 per cent. He was trailed by the CPM’s Madhuja Sen Roy, who polled some 81,000 votes, or a 42 per cent vote share. The BJP candidate, Mohan Rao, had secured less than 15,000 votes and an 8 per cent vote share.
In 2021, Biswas polled 101,440 votes (52 per cent vote share) and became the winner. With 51,360 votes (26.3 per cent), Supriyo came second. Debdut Ghosh of the CPM came third, polling 40,597 votes (20.8 per cent).
“The feedback so far has been positive. The Left votes are coming back to the Left,” Partha Pratim said.
Lights, camera, ban
More than two years ago, some of the biggest names in Bengali films came together to allege that a technicians’ federation owing allegiance to an influential Trinamool Congress leader was “ruining” their work environment and threatening the future of the industry by imposing its diktats.
The Federation of Cine Technicians and Workers of Eastern India (FCTWEI) is headed by Swarup Biswas, Aroop’s brother.
The federation’s favourite weapon is a ban that it has wielded against several directors and actors in the recent past.
No technician turns up for the shoot helmed by a director or involving an actor if they dare to protest against the federation. No work means no pay for many technicians, but they still don’t dare to go against the diktat.
The stand-off between a section of directors and the technicians’ federation has stalled shooting at Tollygunge several times in the past two years. There have been occasions when a deadlock could be broken only after chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s intervention.
A section of directors had filed PILs in Calcutta High Court, alleging that the federation was not allowing them to work.
But the tides have changed. Most of the petitioners have withdrawn their cases and no one would say anything about intimidation. Most big names who had taken up the cudgels for the “sake of the industry” are now seen hobnobbing with Swarup.
Dev, the reigning superstar of the Bengali film industry, is the only A-lister who still speaks openly against the ban culture.
The industry, meanwhile, is ailing. The number of films coming out of Tollygunge is shrinking. Daily soaps are the backbone of the Bengali entertainment industry, which is hobbled by shutdowns and halts in shooting.
Swarup has always maintained that the federation works for the interest of technicians who are otherwise neglected.
The lack of safety protocols during shoots was put under a renewed spotlight by the untimely death of Rahul Arunoday Banerjee while shooting for a serial at Talsari beach in Odisha on March 29.
“The industry is in a very bad shape. There are too many problems to solve. Reining in the federation is the most important job. But the question is who will bell the cat,” said a frontline film director.
Papia Adhikari, actor and the BJP candidate of Tollygunge, alleged that the Biswas brothers had converted Tollygunge into their fiefdom.
“The problems are not confined to the Studiopara alone. The entire constituency needs course correction. I will go about it after winning the seat,” said Adhikari, who did her master’s in comparative literature from JU.
But dislodging Biswas would be easier said than done.
Tollygunge is one of the safest seats for the ruling party, Trinamool insiders said. “Aroop Biswas’s loyalty to Mamata is unquestioned. He also has a more-than-working relationship with Abhishek. He is a leader who is still connected to the grassroots. He knows the booths in his seat like the back of his hand. He enjoys the local-boy tag,” a party insider said.
Biswas is his usual confident self. “The poll season sees many migratory birds. But the people of Tollygunge have faith in the son of the soil, who stays with them 365 days a year, 24X7,” he told The Telegraph.