Bengal Panchayat polls

The story of the recent Bengal panchayat elections is not just about the abundant blood spilt in the state’s villages. For the record, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress has won 90 per cent of the seats. Unless the voting pattern magically reverses, as it happened to the CPI (M) in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in Bengal, Ms. Banerjee has immensely boosted her party's prospects before the 2019 general elections. Neither the violence nor the capturing of most seats by the ruling party is a novelty. Bengal's date with electoral violence began after the Congress' post-Independence hegemony was challenged in the late 60s; it then endured civil violence of the kind Punjab faced nearly two decades later. 

Rather, the underlying theme is the eclipse of the two main players, the Congress and the CPI (M), whose avatars dominated Bengal’s political landscape since Independence. The CPI (M) has slipped to the third position while the Congress even lost its Malda and Murshidabad pocket boroughs to end up at the fourth position. Not too many tears need be shed on the Left's decline for its present leaders were not cut from the same cloth as its first generation of party builders. They took the easy option of cohabitation with the Congress at the grassroots level — former President Pranab Mukherjee's late-career success in Lok Sabha elections was one such outcome.

In the process, and without realising it, both the Congress and the CPI (M) gradually vacated or were squeezed out of the political space for dissent because of their comfort in each other's company. It is now apparent that overt rhetoric deployed against each other in the national media failed to impress the masses in the villages. Dismissed as an urban phenomenon, the BJP’s consistent politics of opposition has earned it substantial inroads into rural Bengal. The coming elections will find the BJP posing as the principal opposition to the Trinamool Congress. The panchayat elections may well have rung the curtains on both the Congress and the CPI (M) entertaining thoughts about returning to Writer’s Building, singly or in a coalition. A new equation has emerged in Bengal.