Labourer’s wife, domestic help are BJP candidates in Bengal

With just Rs 6,335 in her bank account and Rs 25,650 cash in hand, and without any movable or immovable assets, meet 30-year-old Chandana Bauri, who is the wife of a daily wage labourer and BJP’S candidate from Bengal’s Bankura district’s Saltora Assembly constituency.

Chandana started working as a BJP cadre in Saltora from the 2018 Panchayat elections in the state and later rose to be a part of the BJP’S Bankura district committee. And now she has been handed a ticket by the BJP to contest the Assembly elections in West Bengal.

When she first heard the news that she had been declared BJP’S candidate from Saltora, where she was married off at the age of 15 years in 2008, her eyes were filled with tears of joy.

Speaking to The Sunday Guardian, Chandana Bauri said, “I was never expecting that someone like me could ever get a ticket from the party. I was doing my household chores when my neighbours came running to my house after seeing my name had been declared as the party’s candidate from here. At first, I did not believe the news and then I got a confirmation from my district leaders, after which I believed it. I cannot thank my party leaders enough for reposing so much faith in me.”

Bauri, who is a mother to three children—two daughters and a son—was married off at the age of 15 after her father passed away. Her husband Sraban is a mason, who works at construction sites as a daily wage labourer, earning somewhere between Rs 300 to Rs 400 a day.

“I got married at a very young age. My father passed away just two days before my Madhyamik (Class 10) examinations and I barely managed to pass with third division marks. My mother married me off after my examinations, but even then, I continued to study. I appeared for Class 11 examinations and passed, but during Class 12 examinations, I was pregnant and my eldest daughter was born so I could not study. Since then,

I have been raising kids and at times helping my husband at the construction site so that we can earn a little extra money,” Bauri told this newspaper.

Chandana, who generally looked after her children and cooked food at home, would also help her mother-in-law at times to make saal pata plates (plates made from saal leaves). These saal pata plates are made after collecting the fallen saal leaves from the nearby forest and are later sold at very cheap rates in the market.

By way of “assets”, Chandana owns just three goats, two cows and a calf—out of these, one of the cows was given to her by her parents when she got married.