Dent in Muslim vote bank hurt TMC

WHEN Mamata Banerjee returned to power in 2021, with over 48.5% votes for the Trinamool Congress (TMC), it was clear that she had ridden a wave of support from West Bengal’s Muslim voters. The BJP had garnered a vote share of 38%, almost all of which would have come from the state’s 70% Hindu population. It meant that the TMC would have, at best, got 30% of its votes from Hindus and the remaining 18.5% from Muslims. This suggested that nearly 70% of the Muslim voters backed Mamata in 2021.

This time, when the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls disenfranchised 27 lakh living, breathing voters in West Bengal, the TMC alleged that this was meant to target its supporters. The evidence indicated that Muslims might have been disproportionately affected in the final exercise, and it is highly likely that these people would have voted for the TMC in previous elections.

Despite SIR removing dead and living voters, the actual turnout was much higher than in 2021. Nearly 35 lakh more people voted in 2026. Both the BJP and TMC saw this as a sign of their impending victory. The BJP argued that the Election Commission of India (ECI) had made voting safe and people had come out in larger numbers to defeat the incumbent. The TMC claimed that the high turnout was because voters, especially Muslims, wanted to defeat the partisan SIR process.

Some of the highest turnouts were recorded in the very seats most affected by SIR deletions. One reason for this was that the number of voters had fallen, reducing the denominator. But several political pundits, and reporters on the ground, argued that Muslims had come out to vote in larger numbers because they were scared that a BJP victory would endanger their very existence as citizens of India.

The general consensus was that the TMC’s share of Muslim votes would rise further, as Muslims had consolidated behind the party, most likely to keep the BJP out of Bengal. Some West Bengal watchers calculated that if another 15-16% of Muslims were to vote for Mamata, her overall vote share would rise by 5 percentage points, counteracting any potential slide in Hindu votes.

As it turned out, the TMC’s vote share slipped by 7.5 percentage points. If one assumes a Muslim consolidation behind Mamata, then it would follow that there was a drop of 10-11 percentage points in Hindu votes for the TMC.

But a closer look at the voting pattern in the seats with high Muslim population punctures this picture. There are at least 32 seats in Bengal where Muslims account for more than 50% of the electorate. The estimate by pollsters is higher — 38-42 seats — but these 32 are on most lists. The TMC had won all 32 in 2021, and got an unassailable 57.7% vote share. This time, its vote share in these constituencies dropped to 41.4% — a massive decline of 16.3 percentage points.

Was this because of the deletion of Muslim voters during the SIR process? That didn’t affect the final turnout in these seats, which was 4.9 lakh — 7.6% higher than in 2021. Neither did the TMC lose its votes entirely to the BJP. In fact, the BJP’s vote share in these seats rose by only 4.6 percentage points, from 22.1% in 2021 to 26.7%. If we assume that most of these were Hindus who had voted for the TMC last time, then there’s still another 11-12% of the TMC’s votes — mostly Muslim — which went to others.

The largest chunk moved to the Congress and the Left-ISF (Indian Secular Front) combine. These three parties had fought together in 2021 and polled 15.9% of the votes in these 32 seats. This time, their combined vote share — although they fought separately — rose to 23.3%. That’s a gain of 7.4 percentage points, and most of this would have been Muslim votes that switched from the TMC. This points to a growing acceptance among Muslims, in these seats, of the ISF led by Pirzada Naushad Siddiqui of the Furfura Sharif shrine.

The TMC also lost votes to Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AJUP). Kabir was part of the Trinamool till last December, when he was suspended for planning to build a ‘Babri Masjid’ in Bengal. Back then, the TMC had accused him of trying to cause communal polarisation in cahoots with the BJP. Indeed, Kabir had joined the BJP in 2018 and even fought the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Murshidabad on the BJP ticket.

This time, he contested the elections as his own party’s candidate. Just a few weeks before voting, the TMC alleged that it had caught Kabir in a sting operation, asking for money to get Muslim voters to back him. Although Kabir denied it, many believed that this was enough to defang the AJUP factor. The reality turned out to be very different. The AJUP won two of these 32 seats, and took away 3-4% of the TMC’s Muslim votes.

It is tempting to put this down to Muslims being fed up of ‘appeasement’ and ‘vote bank’ politics. The truth could be much more worrying. Even though Siddiqui and Sharif claim to represent everyone, the thrust of their rhetoric is sectarian. Their success suggests that a section of Muslims have moved towards parties which focus only on their concerns as Muslims. That is where they feel safe, at a time when they are being threatened not just with disenfranchisement but also losing their citizenship.

Even when they know that parties like the AJUP and the ISF cannot fight the BJP at the state level, they are willing to vote for them in places where Muslims are in majority.

This is an unexpected collateral damage of the SIR process. A section of Muslims in Bengal appears to be convinced that voting for the so-called ‘secular’ parties will not protect them — they have to organise through overtly ‘Muslim’ parties. This is an unfortunate descent into ghettoisation that West Bengal had evaded till now.