A young Left leader took to the stage in Jadavpur’s Gangulybagan at 11.20pm on Saturday before a packed house that cheered her loudly.

The sight was unusual, both because of the late hour and because the rally was organised by the CPM, which was ousted from power in Bengal 10 years ago and got a meagre 7 per cent vote share in the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

But Minakshi Mukherjee, 37, the state president of DYFI and the CPM’s bet in Nandigram against chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her former protégé Suvendu Adhikari, proved she was a star, no matter what the results on May 2 say.

The Nandigram election got over on April 1, and since Saturday, Minakshi is campaigning for Sanjukta Morcha nominees across the state.

She was at Gangulybagan to campaign for CPM veteran and Jadavpur MLA Sujan Chakraborty and the party’s Tollygunge candidate Debdut Ghosh. The moment her arrival was announced, the crowd started chanting “Comrade Minakshi Mukherjee laal salaam”. Youngsters with cell phones rushed to record her speech or click pictures.

Chakraborty had defeated Trinamul’s Manish Gupta by 14,942 votes in the 2016 Assembly polls in Jadavpur, considered a Left bastion.

“The welcome and warmth of the people of Jadavpur was overwhelming. Most of whom who had turned up for the meeting so late in the night were not party cadres. They were common people, many had lost their jobs or did not have one,” Minakshi told The Telegraph, adding some 4,000 people were present at the meeting that ended around 11.45pm.

The CPM believes that individuals do not matter and places party’s policies and programmes above anything else. Still, the CPM did recently tap into the goodwill of former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who in a recorded message urged voters to support Sanjukta Morcha candidates. “The sight of a crowd waiting to hear Minakshi so late in the night goes to show that individuals do matter in parliamentary democracy,” said a CPM supporter present at Saturday’s rally.

Throughout Saturday, Minakshi campaigned for many Morcha candidates. “I’m doing whatever the party is asking me to,” she said.

The excitement around Minakshi is not a one-off case, said Indraneel Dasgupta, who teaches economics at the Indian Statistical Institute.

“A normal middle-class Bengali citizen still looks up to government jobs. In the last 10 years this area has gone for a toss. Even the private sector gives little employment opportunities in Bengal. As young Left candidates (Minakshi, Dipsita Dhar, Aishe Ghosh, Srijan Bhattacharya, Pratik Ur Rahman) are talking about correcting the situation, many voters are connecting to that,” Dasgupta said, adding that Minakshi also spoke without jargons that added to her appeal.

“She is somebody who seems to be speaking to the average person about things that matter in a way that is refreshingly free of jargons. She comes with the credibility of having been there and done that in terms of struggling through life,” Dasgupta said. “Her nomination from Nandigram has added to her popularity.”

A state CPM leader admitted that a large crowd so late was unusual. “We still have a base in Jadavpur, yet this Saturday crowd was an eye-opener for us in many ways.”