TMC women's brigade: Mix of glamour and experience

Trinamool Congress' (TMC) women candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections shows a prudent mix of celluloid glamour and political experience.

The TMC has fielded films stars Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan, who are household names in Bengal for their work on both small and big screens.

Mamata Banerjee has also decided to field yesteryear's heroines Satabdi Roy and Moon Moon Sen, who are the sitting MPs of the party. Its women candidates also include Mausam Benazir Noor, a Congress MP who recently joined the BJP.

Mimi, a debutante into electoral politics started her acting career in 2008 on the small screen with the daily soap and gained prominence in two years. She made her presence felt in the Bengali film industry with a blockbuster hit in 2012.

Although a political greenhorn, Mimi is known for her proximity to the chief minister and regularly shares the dais with her at TMC programmes.

She was fielded from the Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat, earlier contested by political heavyweights like former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee and the TMC supremo herself.

Nusrat, also close to the chief minister, has been fielded from the minority-dominated Bashirhat constituency.

After she gained prominence by winning a well-known beauty pageant, Nusrat's big screen debut was in 2012, although her career took some time to take off. However, she has been able to her mark in off-beat and commercial films.

Moon Moon and Satabdi are veterans of both politics and the silver screen.

Satabdi is a two-time TMC MP from the Birbhum Lok Sabha seat, which was once a CPM bastion.

TMC sources said that there were uncertainties about her candidature. But in the end, the TMC supremo kept her faith in Roy and fielded her for the third time.

Roy dominated the Bengali film circle for part of 1980s and 1990s. She shot into fame with a film in 1986, where she was cast opposite former TMC MP Tapas Paul.

Sen, the daughter of iconic Bengali actress Suchitra Sen, is a sitting TMC MP from the Bakura Lok Sabha seat.

However, this time she has been fielded in the Asansol Lok Sabha seat, which the TMC lost to BJP in 2014. A section of TMC leadership is sceptical of her political acumen. Sen made her big screen debut in the 1980s and has acted in more than 60 films.

The TMC's candidate from Malda North, Mausam Benazir Noor, is no rookie to electoral politics.

The two-time Congress MP holds considerable organisational clout in the constituency and is being seen as a worthy addition to the TMC. She is the niece of former Union Minister and iconic Congress leader A B A Ghani Khan Chowdhury.