BJP’s Bengal game plan

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

There was more than underlying irony in CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury’s recent statements, wherein he declared the Left Front would wage a double-barrelled battle in the upcoming West Bengal elections: against the BJP and the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Evidently, his assessment of the Left Front’s position is remote from the ground realities. The CPI (M) scored a duck in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and posted an all-time low vote share of 6.3 per cent. Yechury’s declaration came days after Amit Shah, the Home Minister, who has taken it on himself to wrest West Bengal from the TMC, visited the state. Shah embarked on his recent tour from Bankura, a backward region with a high Adivasi population and a former Left bastion. In 2019, the BJP wrenched the district’s two Lok Sabha seats, Bankura and Bishnupur, from the TMC that, in turn, pulled them away from the CPI (M) in 2014. The CPI (M) retained Bankura from 1980 to 2014, and staggeringly, Bishnupur from 1971 to 2014. Therefore, the BJP’s gain derived not so much in beating the TMC as breaching Left territory, because historically, the saffron party regarded the Left parties as an adversary on par on every account: ideological, organisational, statecraft and structural, because like it, the Left entities functioned through a presidium, and not an individual or a family.

The BJP’s rise in the north and the west was not matched by similar strides in the east and the south, barring exceptions.

The BJP’s exponential rise in the north and the west was not matched by similar strides made in the east and the south, barring exceptions. For long, political wisdom maintained that the intrinsic challenge to Hindutva’s overrun came from West Bengal and Tamil Nadu for historical reasons, although to be noted is that Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a founder of the Jana Sangh (BJP’s predecessor), belonged to West Bengal. The BJP stagnated in both states. While Tamil Nadu continues to be below the BJP’s radar, analysts and pollsters could not foresee the quantum leap it made in West Bengal in 2019, from a count of two seats (out of 42) in 2014 and a vote share of 16.8 per cent to 18 seats in 2019 and a 40. 25 per cent slice of the votes. Few, if anyone, believed the Modi wave was about to swamp the eastern state. Deconstructing the BJP’s win in an article, Professors Deepankar Basu (Massachusetts University) and Debarshi Das (IIT-Guwahati) mentioned interesting features. Between 2014 and 2019, the BJP’s vote share did not decline in any parliamentary constituency, while correspondingly, the Left’s share diminished in every seat. The TMC reported a mixed bag of increase and decrease. To the critical question of a correspondence between the Left’s decline and the BJP’s progression, the writers noted that the BJP, and not so much the TMC, benefited where the Left Front significantly lost votes. Their surmise was that the Left cadre and supporters voted ‘strategically’ for the BJP to defeat the TMC.

Unsurprisingly, post 2019 saw defections first from the Left and subsequently the TMC to the BJP. The BJP didn’t exert hard to spirit away the Left’s deserters but Mamata Banerjee and her hard-as-nails attitude towards the ruling party’s leadership and the efforts to pummel her was another kettle of fish. A key component of the BJP’s game plan was to spirit away her key aides, ministers, MPs and MLAs, deflate her morale and enfeeble the TMC.

West Bengal is in sync with the political paradigm the BJP adopted after emerging as a force to reckon with. The once ideologically-driven Left parties have long since shed even a pretence of owing allegiance to their Bible and its commandments, having fed off the loaves and fishes of power for several decades. The cadre, used to operating as parallel power centres, felt deprived once the Left Front was voted out but dexterously moved loyalty to the TMC to escape persecution for their omissions and commissions and perpetuate their well-being.

However, Mamata had to first oblige her own workers who bore the ‘lathi’ blows and brutalities inflicted on them and kept the TMC afloat during the Left Front regime. The disparity in disbursing state patronage created a class of ‘have-nots’ among the former CPM cadre who had flocked to the TMC with high hopes. Before 2019, the ambitious but neglected cadre joined the BJP as an option and raised a workforce where none existed because for long the BJP’s existence was confined to the commercial hubs of Kolkata, dominated by North Indian traders and businessmen.

Indeed, as author Snigdhendu Bhattacharya noted in his book Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment, that while in the 2011 Assembly elections, the BJP put up the highest number of Hindi-speaking candidates among all parties, gradually the leaders from the north were moved into the background once the leaders figured out that Mamata Banerjee would play up ‘sub-nationalism’ as a strategy to counter Hindutva and ‘nationalism’.

Quite apart from raising a party organisation from the micro-level — from the ‘vistarak’ who are meant to be organisational force multipliers like the RSS’s ‘pracharak’— and prising heavyweights from the TMC (Mamata’s closest political aide Mukul Roy was an early acquisition in 2017), the BJP revised its soft strategies as well.

Early on, it realised that propagating Hindutva through festivals such as Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti left no imprint on a state that embraced eclectic forms of Hinduism contained in the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Ramakrishna Paramhansa. KN Govindacharya, a former BJP general secretary, had advocated relating to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the 19th century novelist and poet who wrote ‘Vande Mataram’, and Swami Vivekananda. When on June 27, 2018, Amit Shah spoke on Bankim at a public event organised by the Delhi-based BJP think tank, the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, his theme note was that ‘Vande Mataram’ was a song that unified India and the Congress ‘blundered’ by associating it with religion (read Hinduism). Cultural nationalism, for long an abstract notion, acquired a deeper political resonance.

The other aspects of the BJP’s blueprint were a narrative inspired by a familiar strand used in Bihar in the nineties: conjuring images of violence and lawlessness and projecting Mamata as the head of another ‘family’ promoting a kinglet, her nephew and Diamond Harbour MP Abhishek Banerjee. The BJP was convinced that the state was a low-hanging fruit ripe to be picked by it. From Brahmaputra that flows through Assam, it’s eastward to the Bhagirathi-Hooghly.

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