Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury: Congress strongman who held on in trying times 

Being someone who has strong family ties to Baharampur, the district headquarters of West Bengal’s Murshidabad district - famous for the legacy of Nawabs Alivardi Khan and Siraj-ud-Daulah, its 1000-door Hazarduari Palace, its many delicious variants of mangoes -- I had heard a lot about Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury much before I became a journalist.

When I was in high school and would visit the town during vacations, he had unsuccessfully contested an Assembly election in the early 90’s but managed to give the CPI(M) juggernaut, that steamrolled everything in its path those days, an extremely serious scare.

It is said that nearly 300 CPI(M) cadres chased him into a polling booth. Anyway, in the mid 90’s, he became an MLA while he was in jail and could not campaign in the election.

The locals of Baharampur held him in such reverence that you could be forgiven to have pictured him as a Bengali avatar of Robin Hood. In 1999, he entered the Lok Sabha for the first time.

The legend of Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury only grew as time went by. People would say in hushed voices, “When Adhir comes, a cavalcade follows,” “If you can’t arrange for money for your daughter’s wedding, just go to Adhir. He will take care of it all,” “Don’t have money for funeral rights. Adhir is there.”

It was in 2004 that I saw the man for the first time. I had gone to Murshidabad to do a story on keepers of the many monuments who were still being paid the same salaries as their forefathers drew 100 years back.

I was returning to my Baharampur hotel room from Lalgola on one afternoon when I saw thousands of Congress workers march towards the historical Square Field in the centre of the town, famous for its barracks whose occupants had risen up against their colonial masters in 1857.

The Congress was holding a rally and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury was going to address it. Since I had no engagements at that point of time, I decided to attend the same. And there I saw the man climbing on to the dais. He was wearing a white kurta and white pyjamas and the crowd broke into a thunderous roar as he raised his hands from the dais.

He spoke clearly and powerfully before a commotion from the end of the ground interrupted him. A counter rally led by CPI(M)’s Murshidabad strongman Nripen Chowdhury had entered the main road in front of the DM’s office that lay at the end of the field. It was a sizeable rally and the CPI(M) was the ruling party in the state.

Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said over the loudspeaker in Bengali which can be loosely translated into “I am asking the CPI(M) cadres to turn back the way they came from.” The big procession with red flags promptly turned back.

It would be more than a year since then that I would actually meet Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury for an interaction at his Gorabazar residence. It was towards the end of 2005 when I was a correspondent for The Week magazine in Kolkata. The Baharampur MP had just spent over a month in jail on a double murder charge. I had reached quite early along with my photographer and was ushered into a room on the ground floor.

A sizeable crowd of people had already gathered outside his residence. Adhir’s men, as they would say in Baharampur, were busy taking down notes on their demands and arranging them into queues. Senior citizens, the disabled were being brought inside and given seats that ran along a corridor.

Soon, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury entered the room, spoke to a few of his assistants and turned towards us. “If you are not in a hurry, I would like to get work done first. Please do not mind.” We did not. We were not in any sort of tearing hurry and had anyhow reached too early.

Over the next few hours, what followed was a stream of people rolling into the room with their demands and requests. Chowdhury was seated on a wooden chair in front of a table, listening to them and passing on instructions to his two assistants who sat at two other tables, continuously scribbling countless letters addressed to various authorities. When we returned to our hotel, the owner told us, “So, how did you find the Durbar?”

But while we sat there, watching him listen to people and offering quick redressals, it did not feel that a king was holding a court. It was like he had genuine connect with those people, that he felt responsible for them. I went out and spoke to few people who had come with their pleas and demands. The refrain was unanimous that while the administration slept on their demands, one line on Chowdhury’s letterhead worked like a magic wake-up potion.

I remember my first question to him after I introduced myself including my family ties to Baharampur, all of whom he readily recognised. It was about his strongman image. He was thoroughly unapologetic about it.

“I am not a goon. But yes, you need to be strong to get work done,” he had said. Over the course of years, I met him many times for work and otherwise. The last was in 2018 on a Kolkata to Delhi flight.

Chowdhury is a self-made man. He has held on to his citadel in the worst times of the Congress party. Although he is generally known for winning elections by a margin of a few lakhs, an 80,000 victory margin in these elections, in a three-way fight where the Modi-led BJP blew up money at its whim and the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress deputed its leading strongman to ensure his defeat, is a loud statement on the entrenchment of his roots in the soil of Baharampur.

The rivalry of Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and Mamata Banerjee goes back to the early 90’s. Very few know that Chowdhury was involved in the Naxalite movement in the 70’s, later joining the RSP and getting close to CITU, the CPI(M)’s trade union arm before joining the Congress.

An excellent communicator in both Bengali and Hindi, he now has the huge responsibility of attacking the policies of the BJP government while forcefully presenting his party’s stand on the floor of the Lok Sabha when his party is not in any position of strength. He has battled many challenges before including a personal one of the tragic death of his daughter who fell off a Kolkata high-rise. Only an extremely strong man can deliver against such odds. The Congress’ choice of the Baharampur strongman is thus prudent.