Haripal, a general category seat in Hooghly district, was carved out in 1967. It consists of the Haripal community development block and four gram panchayats of Singur block, giving it a largely rural character with only small urban pockets.
The constituency has gone to the polls 14 times. Before the CPI(M) juggernaut rolled in, the Samyukta Socialist Party and the Workers Party of India had won the seat twice each. The CPI(M) then tightened its grip over Haripal with seven consecutive victories between 1977 and 2006. The Trinamool Congress has since taken charge, winning three back-to-back terms from 2011 onwards.
Becharam Manna of the Trinamool Congress won Haripal in 2011 by defeating Bharati Mukherjee of the CPI(M) by 22,073 votes. He consolidated his position further in 2016, when he beat Jogiyananda Mishra of the CPI(M) by 31,475 votes. In 2021, the baton passed within the family, as his wife Karabi Manna won the seat by defeating the BJP’s Samiran Mitra by 23,072 votes.
Trinamool’s dominance is also clear in the Lok Sabha voting from the Haripal Assembly segment. Under a seat-sharing arrangement with Congress, it did not contest the Haripal seat in the 2009 Assembly election, when the Congress led the CPI(M) by 554 votes from this segment. The Trinamool Congress has since taken a commanding lead in all three parliamentary elections. It led the CPI(M) by 40,360 votes in 2014. From 2019, the BJP has pushed past the CPI(M) to occupy second place, but without mounting a serious challenge to Trinamool’s primacy. Trinamool’s lead over the BJP stood at 9,564 votes in 2019 and then jumped to 32,459 votes in 2024.
Haripal had 277,484 registered voters in 2024, compared to 269,649 in 2021, 259,773 in 2019, 246,588 in 2016, and 214,029 in 2011. Scheduled Castes account for 26.04 per cent of the electorate, Scheduled Tribes 5.74 per cent, and Muslims 21.30 per cent, making it a seat where both caste and community equations matter. It is overwhelmingly rural, with 96.98 per cent of voters living in villages and only 3.02 per cent in urban pockets. Voter turnout has been consistently high, at 85.45 per cent in 2011, 84.58 per cent in 2016, 81.16 per cent in 2019, 82.13 per cent in 2021, and 80.73 per cent in 2024.
Haripal town serves as the headquarters of the Haripal block and lies in the Chandannagore subdivision of Hooghly district. It is part of the agriculturally rich Hooghly plains, with flat, fertile alluvial land fed by rivers and canals linked to the Hooghly and its distributaries. The terrain is mostly level, dotted with ponds and irrigation channels, and suited to intensive cultivation of paddy and other crops, though low-lying pockets can be affected by waterlogging during heavy monsoon rains.
Agriculture remains the backbone of the local economy. Farmers grow paddy, potato, jute, and vegetables. The region has a reasonably dense network of rural roads, markets, schools, and health centres, and benefits from its proximity to industrial and urban centres in other parts of the Hooghly district. A share of the workforce commutes out to work in nearby towns and in the wider Kolkata region, adding to household incomes.
Haripal is linked to Kolkata and the rest of the district by both rail and road. It lies on the Howrah-Tarakeswar railway line of the suburban network, with direct trains connecting Haripal and Howrah. The distance between Haripal and Kolkata is around 45 to 50 km by rail and road. The district headquarters at Chinsurah is about 35 to 36 km away, while towns such as Singur, Tarakeswar, and Jangipara fall within a radius of roughly 20 to 40 km, tying Haripal into a wider rural and semi-urban cluster in the heart of Hooghly.
Politically, while the BJP has clearly emerged as the principal challenger to the Trinamool Congress in Haripal, the size of Trinamool’s leads in the last two elections suggests that the BJP will need to pull off something close to a miracle to win this seat in 2026. The slow but steady decline of the Left Front-Congress alliance to the periphery offers little comfort to the BJP, as it has not yet translated into a decisive shift of votes away from Trinamool. There is also the hard fact that since 1977, Haripal has consistently voted for the party that has either formed or gone on to form the state government, a trend that, if it holds, will continue to favour the Trinamool Congress in the coming Assembly elections.
(Ajay Jha)
