(As West Bengal gears up for the Assembly polls, every Tuesday, The Indian Express’s Kolkata bureau chief Ravik Bhattacharya decodes the electoral trends, political signals, and campaign moves shaping the contest.)
Over the last decade, starting from the 2016 West Bengal Assembly polls, the countdown to polling day used to see coordinated campaign efforts between the Congress and the CPI(M) in the state, with leaders and workers of the rivals-turned-allies sharing party offices, planning events and chalking out joint strategies.
However, this time, the Congress has announced its decision to go alone in the upcoming elections to Bengal’s 294-member Assembly, breaking away from an alliance with the Left that struggled to displace the ruling Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) in 2016 and faced a complete rout in 2021, when both of them had drawn a blank.
Congress calculus
The Congress camp seeks to link the ‘Ekla Cholo’ decision to its bid to revive the party organisation in a state where it has not held power on its own since 1977 – when the Left formed its first government. The alliance with the CPI(M)-led Left had failed to ensure the grand old party’s comeback in the 2021 Assembly polls or the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress is also looking to reopen its electoral account in the state. Days after the announcement to go solo, Congress observer for the Bengal polls, Sudip Roy Barman, said, “We could not win even a single seat in 2021. It cannot get worse than this and hence we have decided to contest alone.”
The Congress is also keeping an eye on the 2029 Lok Sabha polls, looking to strengthen its bargaining position as the leading player of the Opposition INDIA bloc. The party’s defeats in several state elections, before and after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, had resulted in its allies questioning its credentials to lead a national Opposition front.
Contesting alone may also allow the Congress to break the TMC vs BJP narrative, given the contradictory nature of the Congress-Left alliance. For, despite their alignments in Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu, the Congress and Left remain bitter rivals in Kerala. Each of these four states is also headed to the polls over the next couple of months, even as both the TMC and the BJP have pointed to this dichotomy in every poll campaign since 2016.
Political challenges
It remains to be seen whether the Congress’s gamble would pay off in terms of seats in Bengal, but it is set to face various challenges.
Given its weakened organisational strength and grassroots-level presence, the Congress is already facing questions over whether it has the capacity or the candidates to contest from all the 294 seats. Also, whether it will have the resources and manpower to run an effective campaign and maintain a booth-level presence throughout the campaign. These questions have been raised behind closed doors by a section of the state Congress leaders.
During the Election Commission (EC)’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the Congress was only able to name 18,847 Booth-Level Agents (BLAs) to monitor the exercise, of whom 17,000 were active. In contrast, for over 80,000 booths across the state, the TMC had 78,414 BLAs, BJP 61,874 and CPI(M) 49,840. This is despite the Congress leading the charge at the national level against the EC and the BJP-led Centre over the SIR row.
Alliance history
Three years after Mamata Banerjee broke away from the Congress to form the TMC in 1998, the two parties struck an alliance for the first time ahead of the 2001 Bengal Assembly polls, but were unable to break the Left’s hold on the state.
In the 2006 polls, the Congress contested alone, winning 21 seats, down from 26 in the 2001 polls.
The TMC managed to end the 34-year Left rule in 2011, when it had forged an alliance with the Congress which won 42 seats. But after most of its MLAs quit to join the TMC, the Congress joined hands with the CPI(M) in 2016 and won 44 seats. In the 2021 polls, their coalition was reduced to just one seat – won by their junior ally Indian Secular Front (ISF).
TMC-BJP binary
Since the BJP’s rise in Bengal after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, a TMC-BJP binary has taken hold in the state’s political discourse. The 2021 polls saw the BJP emerge not only as the main Opposition in the Assembly, but also at the grassroots level.
In an increasingly polarised political landscape, the BJP captured the Opposition’s space, gaining ground at the expense of the Congress and the Left. While the Congress and Left fell to zero MLAs from the 2016 to the 2021 polls, the BJP rose from 3 to 77.
The challenge of reversing this trend is immense, and puts further pressure on the Congress now.
Rebuilding bastions
Before the TMC cornered the Muslim vote bank in Bengal, the Congress had established strongholds in districts like Murshidabad and Malda. Of the two districts’ combined 34 Assembly seats, the TMC holds 28 with the remaining held by the BJP.
Leaders like A B A Ghani Khan Choudhury, the late former railway minister, and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, ex-state Congress chief, were once associated with the party’s power centres in Malda and Murshidabad, respectively.
Of late, Adhir’s rallies in Murshidabad have seen large crowds, with the issue of alleged attacks against Bengali-speaking migrants in other states getting traction. Adhir has been in the limelight over this issue, from raising it in a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in December to rushing to Odisha following the death of a migrant worker from Murshidabad there.
But whether Adhir’s own potential candidacy, or even his choice of party candidates from Murshidabad district, will get the support of the Bengal Congress and its president Subhankar Sarkar has yet to be seen.
Adhir, who had favoured an alliance with the CPI(M) in Bengal, has seen his political relevance diminish since the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, when he lost to the TMC’s cricketer-turned-politician Yusuf Pathan in Murshidabad district’s Baharampur seat, which the former had won in five consecutive elections since 1999.
The return of former TMC MP Mausam Benazir Noor, Ghani Khan Choudhury’s niece, to the Congress recently has boosted the party, giving it another chance to claim the legacy of the late stalwart. Isha Khan Choudhury, the Congress’s lone Lok Sabha MP from Bengal, is Ghani Khan’s nephew.
Shot in arm to TMC
With the Opposition in Bengal now further divided following the Congress’s decision, political circles see the TMC gaining an advantage.
A four-cornered fight – between the TMC, BJP, Congress and Left – is likely to lead to a division of votes that would favour the incumbent party.
As the CPI(M) looks to build a larger non-TMC, non-BJP coalition – opening talks with parties like the ISF and ex-TMC leader Humayun Kabir’s newly floated Janata Unnayan Party (JUP) – the Congress’s absence could dent the impact of any Left-led alliance. However, a tacit understanding on the ground between sections of the Congress and the CPI(M) in some belts could not be ruled out.