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Sodpur/Panihati: In most elections, parties try to impose an issue on the voters. In Panihati, the issue arrived before the campaign did, through a body, a state in revolt, and a wound that has not closed.

Nearly two years after the rape and murder of a young doctor from the area at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9, 2024, Panihati remains the constituency where the demand for justice has not been reduced to memory, ritual or television debate. Here, the largest citizens’ movement Bengal has seen in recent years still breathes through ward meetings, doctors’ gatherings, street-corner discussions and electoral arguments. In this election, Panihati has grown from an assembly seat on the northern edge of Kolkata into the political afterlife of the incident we have grown to call “R.G. Kar.”

Panihati this time is not merely voting amid anti-incumbency, welfare calculations or the familiar Trinamool Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party polarisation. The constituency, once a stronghold of industrial labour and Left politics, has in the last decade been remade by factory closures, precarious urbanisation, municipal decay and the rise of a restless middle-class politics. Then came R.G. Kar, and with it a citizens’ uprising that cut across party loyalties.

The BJP has tried to convert that moral force into electoral capital by fielding Ratna Debnath, the mother of the slain doctor, as its candidate. The decision has made Panihati one of the most emotionally charged battlegrounds in the state.

Debnath’s candidature gives the BJP an issue no conventional campaign could have manufactured: grief sharpened into accusation, and accusation turned into a demand for votes. Senior leaders Smriti Irani and Biplab Deb had accompanied her for her nomination filing. 

VIDEO | West Bengal Polls: BJP leader Smriti Irani (@smritiirani) says, “I appeal people of Bengal to support RG Kar victim’s mother fighting for justice.” Earlier today, Irani accompanied BJP candidate and RG Kar victim’s mother, Ratna Debnath, for the filing of her nomination… pic.twitter.com/VkHDumW2dI — Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) April 9, 2026

VIDEO | West Bengal Polls: BJP leader Smriti Irani (@smritiirani) says, “I appeal people of Bengal to support RG Kar victim’s mother fighting for justice.”

Earlier today, Irani accompanied BJP candidate and RG Kar victim’s mother, Ratna Debnath, for the filing of her nomination… pic.twitter.com/VkHDumW2dI

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) April 9, 2026

Campaigning in Ward No. 6, Ratna Debnath said, “I am seeking justice. If justice is delivered for my........

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