BJP exposing chinks in Mamata’s armour

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

For months, even after a spectacular score in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal, the BJP floundered in a labyrinth of dilemmas that offered no easy exit before the 2021 Assembly poll. The BJP’s dilemmas were framed on three aspects: core ideology vs governance; the national as opposed to the regional/local; and projecting a chief ministerial candidate or not.

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The issue with hard-selling the RSS’s fundamental beliefs, founded on the ‘supremacy’ of Hinduism and ultra-nationalism, was that they militated against West Bengal’s social and cultural convictions and were initially rejected by the opinion moulders who influence political leanings.

After thrashing around for several months, the BJP found an anchor to fasten its line of attack on the Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, melding the very elements that earlier looked incongruous.

The year 2020 offered a big breakthrough to the BJP. The pandemic and the Amphan cyclone shaped its campaign. A health crisis and a natural calamity made for a potent mix because in the BJP’s perception, while Covid-19 management exposed Mamata’s ‘incompetence’, the devastating cyclone reflected on her government’s ‘lack of preparedness’ and highlighted the alleged corruption involved in relief distribution, complaints of cutbacks in direct benefit transfers and diverting funds allocated for reconstructing homes to undeserving persons. When the targeted beneficiaries protested, they were reportedly intimidated by workers of the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

West Bengal’s ‘party society’, a feature that evolved into an institution under the Left Front, is the bane and boon of its politics. Committed workers and confirmed voters of a party/coalition can ask for the moon and get slivers of favours. When the Left Front cadre shifted allegiance to the TMC, it hauled the ‘party society’ with it. The patronage, reward and punishment remained, except that while the Left had enough and more time to finesse the system, the TMC fumbled, unable to prioritise its patrons: the defectors or the original rank and file.

The anomaly created a sub-sect of haves and have-nots. The latter, disillusioned by unfulfilled expectations and unrewarded loyalty, looked for options. But the first hint of ‘disloyalty’ was quashed by retribution that took the form of assaults, frame-ups and denial of governmental welfare schemes.

The Left or the Congress might have been an alternative but for the fact that their base moved to the BJP in 2019. Therefore, although sections of the voters might have pined for a return to the Left, the CPM and its allies did not have a leg to stand on. Additionally, when a party’s ideology had to be spelt out, the Left and the Congress were bracketed with the TMC.

There ended the difference. The BJP projected itself as the TMC’s bona fide alternative, overcoming its generic weaknesses such as the lack of a robust organisation and local leaders. The last Lok Sabha elections popularised the slogan ‘Prothame Ram, pore Vaam’ (first Ram, then the Left).

The BJP’s biggest success in West Bengal was embedding Ram in the state’s religious iconography. The Ayodhya ‘movement’ never fired the imagination of Bengali-speaking Hindus. However, the notions of ‘Hindu pride’ and ‘nationalism’ became the bywords for Hindu empowerment after the BJP cashed in on Mamata’s concerted moves for the minorities that lent themselves to the ‘appeasement’ charge. The allegation stuck on her and chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ became as kosher as venerating Durga. It was construed as an act of defiance against Mamata’s politics of ‘reverse polarisation’.

The campaign against Mamata’s governance (or lack of it) segued into the larger themes of faith and nationalism as the BJP embarked on another project of taking Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s poem Vande Mataram across West Bengal and emphasising the ‘nationalist’ overtones of the novel Anand Math that contains the poem.

The incipient signs of unease within the TMC were visible when a stream of defections began. Before 2019, Mamata lost a key political confidant, Mukul Roy, to the BJP. The BJP was invested in Roy for his organisational skills and vast network among the TMC’s adherents and hoped for early payoffs.

Suvendu Adhikari, a leader of significance from Nandigram, the epicentre of the revolt against the Left Front government over land acquisition that turned around Mamata’s fortunes, deserted her and went to the BJP. Adhikari’s entry was heralded by a huge public meeting on his home turf that was presided over by Amit Shah, the Home Minister.

The BJP extracted the political capital it could from this event to enhance its profile that increasingly depended on spiriting away TMC heavyweights ostensibly to recompense the absence of its own leaders. Others followed, although the growing presence of the TMC renegades led to discomfort among the BJP’s ‘originals’, regardless of whether their political base mattered electorally or not.

However, each desertion hit Mamata, personally and politically, because those that left cited the clout and power exercised by her nephew and heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee as the reason.

Rajya Sabha MP, Dinesh Trivedi, the latest turncoat, may not be electorally significant but the veteran of many parties is a Gujarati businessman who has many friends across the political spectrum as well as the industry and was, therefore, useful to the TMC. Like his colleagues, Trivedi is veering towards the BJP.

The entry of Asaduddin Owaisi, president of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), as a ‘serious’ player and of Abbas Siddiqui, purportedly an influential cleric of Hooghly’s Furfura Sharif shrine, triggered the usual pre-poll chatter of an imminent split in the TMC’s Muslim support. Owaisi’s one-region impact in the Bihar elections bolstered the belief that he was out to damage Mamata’s minority base. Unlike Bihar that experiments with new entrants and formations, West Bengal is a ‘party society’ that looks askance at new arrivals.

Mamata is doubtless battling with her back to the wall. Is this her last stand? Or will she stage an epic fightback?

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