(Each week, Deputy Editor Liz Mathew maps the changing political landscape from New Delhi, focusing on power equations, policy moves, and shifts in alliances.)
The BJP and the NDA alliance are in power in 21 states and Union Territories, but that is not enough for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party workers, according to Amit Shah. “There will be a smile on their faces when there is a BJP government in West Bengal,” the Union Home Minister said at a rally in the state last week.
However, the party’s task is cut out as it looks to dislodge the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) that is seeking to return to power for a fourth straight term. With the near obliteration of the Left Front and the Congress, Bengal politics is back to being a bipolar clash between Banerjee’s charisma and her government’s populist welfare initiatives on the one hand and the BJP’s high-stakes gamble on the other, built on the hopes of a pan-Bengal Hindu consolidation, anti-incumbency, and a “TMC is corrupt” narrative.
While the estimated 30%-plus Muslim population are expected to back the TMC as usual, Hindus, except in pockets of Murshidabad, Malda, and Uttar Dinajpur districts, appear divided about backing the BJP. Amid the BJP’s attempts to make an issue out of what it claims is a demographic imbalance in border districts and communal polarisation, the Bengal elections appear to be a volatile political tinderbox.
Advantage TMC?
Banerjee’s third term has been far from smooth. With the BJP emerging as the primary Opposition force — it won 77 seats in the 2021 polls — the TMC was rocked by a series of scandals, from the Sandeshkhali violence and the R G Kar rape-murder case to the teacher’s recruitment scam and other corruption allegations.
However, Banerjee has managed to bounce back with a combination of political theatre — as she illustrated by appearing in the Supreme Court last week to argue her case against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and by snatching her party’s strategy documents during an Enforcement Directorate raid last month— welfare, and an invocation of Bengali asmita or pride that, in a continuation of her 2021 playbook, paints the BJP as a party of “outsiders”. Accused of not being able to create any jobs, the TMC chief has resorted to cash transfers to women, youth, and ASHA and anganwadi workers who comprise her core support base.
While Muslims, another pillar on which Banerjee rose to power and consolidated it, have shown signs of unhappiness over several groups in the community getting dropped from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) list or reclassified, the fear over getting excluded from the electoral rolls during SIR and the possibility of the BJP coming to power are likely to ensure there is no shift.
“The hearing of logical discrepancies has the potential to change the political lines. The final list will bring about a new political situation,” said a TMC MP.
With the BJP hoping that a large chunk of voters in south Bengal’s urban and semi-urban areas, whom they deem to be “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, get deleted from the rolls, the final list of voters will be crucial for both the TMC and the BJP. This could, in theory, bring several constituencies into play in a region considered a TMC stronghold.
What’s holding back the BJP?
The BJP will draw courage from the momentum it has enjoyed over the past year and a half — wins in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, and Bihar — and the Narendra Modi factor, but organisationally, it still cannot match up to the TMC. Senior BJP leader and Union Minister Bhupender Yadav was given charge of the state only last September and sources said he made efforts from the start to boost the party’s grassroots network.
The BJP has another problem: no face that can match up to a mass leader like Mamata. Though Suvendu Adhikari is the most popular leader in its ranks, many senior leaders, who like to point out they have been with the party since the time it was a marginal force in the state, are against Adhikari. These leaders have reservations about the state Leader of Opposition, who was once Mamata’s top lieutenant. The appointment of Samik Bhattacharya, a prominent bhadralok face, as the state BJP president was seen as an attempt to bring about a truce between these two groups.
Both Bhattacharya and Yadav have intensified their efforts to mobilise OBCs and the Matuas, a Dalit religious group whose backing was instrumental in the BJP’s 2019 Lok Sabha election performance. The backing of the Matuas had helped the party register its best-ever performance in parliamentary polls in the state by winning 18 seats. However, concerns triggered by SIR and a fissure in the Matua leadership — BJP leader and Union Minister Shantanu Thakur has publicly fought with his brother and BJP MLA Subrata Thakur — have raised question marks about the party’s ability to repeat that performance.
The BJP is also banking on the situation unfolding in neighbouring Bangladesh to consolidate Hindu votes to a large degree, especially in north Bengal, where it is organisationally the strongest.
The others
The footprints of the Congress and the Left have rapidly shrunk in the last decade and are not trying up for an election in Bengal for the first time since 2016. However, they realistically do not stand a chance of making any big impact and their focus will be on rebuilding themselves.
A growing closeness of the Indian Secular Front, which has links to the popular Furfura Sharif shrine and the clerics who run it, and former TMC leader Humayun Kabir’s Janata Unnayan Party, has also drawn the TMC’s attention. Last month, Kabir laid the foundation of a Babri Masjid replica in Murshidabad, setting the stage for polarisation that could hurt the TMC more than the BJP. Though the two parties do not pose a realistic threat to the TMC’s minority votes, they have caused unease in the state’s ruling party.