Bengal politics has taken a turn for the worse

As the long-drawn eight-phase Assembly polls come to a close, one thing is sure: politics in West Bengal has changed forever, for the worse. I am not making an election forecast here. Exit polls should be out soon and we may get a sense of how this keenly fought contest has ended. In a close election like this one, I would wait for the actual count on May 2.

In any case, I don’t need to anticipate the exact outcome to make my point. For my purpose, it is enough to assume some basics. I assume that this election was more or less a direct contest between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP. The expectation that the Left Front may be able to stage a comeback in alliance with the Congress and Indian Secular Front did not happen. This third force is expected to end up as a distant third, with around 10 per cent of popular votes.

I also assume that it was a pretty close contest in terms of votes, though that may not reflect in the number of seats. The TMC and the BJP would share around 80 per cent votes between themselves. If it is 40:40, the election is on the razor’s edge and we could see a nail-biting finish. If it is 42:38 in Mamata Banerjee’s favour, the media would be singing paeans to her leadership and Prashant Kishor’s micromanagement. And if it is the other way around, TV studios would be raving about the great saffron surge created by the Modi-Shah duo.

No matter which of these scenarios unfolds on May 2, it is clear that a fundamental political realignment has taken place in West Bengal. The BJP’s extraordinary success in West Bengal in the Lok Sabha elections of 2019 was clearly no flash in the pan. Despite a significant presence of Hindu political organisations immediately before and after Partition — first the Jan Sangh and then the BJP — they were never more than a marginal factor in the state. As late as 2011 the BJP drew a blank with just 4.1 per cent votes in the Assembly polls. That improved to just three seats and 10.2 per cent votes in the 2016 polls. The BJP was firmly on the margins.

All that changed dramatically in 2019 when the BJP built upon Modi’s popularity to emerge as the main challenger to the TMC, winning 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats and securing 40.6 per cent votes. The question was whether the BJP would be able to hold on to this success in this Assembly election or recede to its marginal position. We don’t have the result, but we have the answer to this question: politics of Hindutva is here to stay in West Bengal. For some time now, political competition in the state will be TMC vs BJP — an unthinkable proposition a few years ago.

This has been accompanied by a social realignment. The BJP entered state politics by courting marginal regions and social groups. Its initial successes were in the backward regions of north Bengal and Jangalmahal in the west. It created a base by courting Dalits, adivasis, Hindu migrants from Bangladesh and Hindi speakers in urban pockets. Since 2019, the BJP has expanded its net much beyond these sections. This time, it has gone into the heartland of rural south Bengal and created a space for itself among the Bengali middle class, the bhadralok. Yet, by stoking caste politics in a state where it was suppressed for long, the BJP may have triggered a new kind of identity politics.

The fulcrum of this politics is, of course, Hindu mobilisation. Popular vote share of anywhere close to 40 per cent would mean that the BJP has succeeded in consolidating about two-thirds of the 70 per cent Hindu voters in the state. This electoral realignment would have long-term consequences. In a state with about 30 per cent Muslim voters, the BJP would need to keep Hindus in a state of heightened anxiety, if not panic, to keep them consolidated at this peak level. The rise of the Indian Secular Front, a Muslim political party, indicates the future possibility of counter-mobilisation among the Muslims. Bengal, thus, faces the prospects of being pushed to its sordid communal past of the 1940s when it was the epicentre of Hindu-Muslim violence.

Add to it the role of muscle, money and election machine this time. It was widely feared that this may be one of the least free and fair elections in Bengal. Many of those fears have turned out to be true. Muscle power is not new in Bengal politics. Its roots go back to the 1960s, in the clashes between the Congress and Communists and then the intra-Communist feuds. It is no secret that the Left Front government routinely deployed violence against its political adversaries. The TMC continued and accentuated this legacy. The large-scale violence unleashed by the TMC strongmen during the panchayat elections of 2018 is one of the reasons for popular disaffection with the ruling party. Now, the BJP has continued the tradition as many erstwhile Left workers have reportedly shifted their loyalties to the BJP. What the BJP still lacked in its ability to take on the TMC musclemen, it was made up by the central security forces, as alleged by Mamata Banerjee.

As for money, this was clearly the most expensive election in the history of the state. While there are no reports of large-scale voter bribing, money was pouring in multiple ways that the state has not seen before: pre-election defection of leaders, money to local middlemen, propping up of new TV channels and massive advertisements. Once this trend begins, there is no going back. It is also fair to say that the Election Commission was more partisan in this election than it has been in any other election.

Finally, the ‘professional’ management of elections marks a new turn in the history of Bengal, if not the country. Following the shocker in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Mamata Banerjee outsourced political strategy and management to Prashant Kishor’s team which created a parallel structure to the party. They helped design new and popular policies, forged a new image, helped in the selection of candidates and in the micromanagement of the campaign and polling. We do not know if all that would suffice to give Mamata a third term. But we do know that it would be hard to go back to the old-style election management by political leaders and cadres.

It may have also led Bengal and the rest of the country into American-style politics as management.

Views are personal