Champdani Assembly Election 2024

Champdani Assembly constituency comprises Champdani municipality, Baidyabati municipality, wards 1 and 2 and 20 to 24 of Serampore municipality, along with Payarapur gram panchayat of the Sreerampur-Uttarpara community development block, along with the Sheoraphuli and Baidyabati urban belts. 

Located on the western bank of the Hooghly, Champdani grew as part of the Hooghly jute belt, and several jute and textile mills, engineering units and related factories came up here under British rule, drawing a large migrant workforce from Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh while locals stayed in agriculture, giving the town a distinct working class and cosmopolitan character that survives despite closures and labour unrest in recent decades.​

Champdani has seen 14 Assembly elections since 1967. The CPI(M) has been the most successful force with six wins, while the Congress has won on five occasions, the Communist Party of India has taken the seat once, and the Trinamool Congress has won twice so far.​

Muzaffar Khan delivered Trinamool Congress its first win in Champdani in 2011, defeating sitting CPI(M) MLA Jibesh Chakrabarty by 36,313 votes. In 2016, Abdul Mannan of the Congress wrested the seat by defeating sitting Trinamool MLA Muzaffar Khan by 7,282 votes in a close contest. Trinamool Congress regained Champdani in 2021 when its candidate Arindam Guin beat BJP nominee Dilip Singh by 30,078 votes, while sitting MLA Abdul Mannan, fielded as the joint Congress-Left Front candidate, slipped to a distant third with 11.57 per cent of the vote against 35.25 per cent for the BJP and 50.20 per cent for Trinamool Congress.

In contrast to this flip-flopping in Assembly contests, Trinamool Congress has led in all four Lok Sabha elections since 2009 in the Champdani segment, although its margins over the BJP have been modest in the last three. Trinamool’s lead over the BJP here stood at 2,433 votes in 2014, 1,859 votes in 2019 and 8,591 votes in 2024, underlining a steadily tightening two-way contest in parliamentary polls.​

Champdani had 263,498 registered voters in 2024, a marginal rise from 263,372 in 2021 and up from 248,396 in earlier cycles, with the modest growth influenced in part by reverse migration following industrial closures. Muslims form the single largest voting group at 14.40 per cent, followed closely by Scheduled Castes at 12.36 per cent and Scheduled Tribes at 2.89 per cent. The constituency is overwhelmingly urban, with 97.11 per cent urban voters and only 2.89 per cent rural voters on the rolls. Voter turnout has been remarkably steady for an urban industrial belt, with 77.25 per cent polling in 2011, 76.89 per cent in 2016, 76.68 per cent in 2019 and 76.36 per cent in 2021.​

Champdani sits in the heart of Hooghly’s jute industrial zone, with mills such as Northbrook and Dalhousie once employing thousands, though several have shut or faced repeated shutdowns due to labour disputes, wage issues and structural decline in the jute industry. The town lies on the flat alluvial plains along the Hooghly River. It is integrated into the Kolkata Suburban Railway network through the nearby Baidyabati station on the Howrah-Bardhaman main line, where suburban trains run at intervals of about 5 to 10 minutes, providing quick access to central Kolkata and surrounding towns. By rail and road, Champdani is about 35 to 40 km from central Kolkata, roughly 10 to 15 km from the Hooghly Chinsurah district headquarters, about 5 to 10 km from Serampore and Baidyabati and within 20 to 30 km of other important Hooghly towns such as Chandannagar and Rishra, making it a densely linked urban industrial corridor along the river.​

With Trinamool Congress leading in six of the last seven major elections in this belt, history currently leans towards the ruling party in West Bengal. At the same time, the BJP has emerged from the margins to become a serious challenger, already strong enough to push Trinamool Congress for every vote in both Assembly and parliamentary contests. Adding to the complexity is the revival of the Congress-Left Front alliance, whose vote share in Champdani rose from 11.58 per cent in 2021 to 19.43 per cent in 2024, a shift that has clipped Trinamool’s vote share and opened up the prospect of a genuinely triangular contest in 2026 in which even small swings between Trinamool Congress, the BJP and the Congress-Left combine could decide the winner in this closely watched urban industrial seat.​

(Ajay Jha)