The contest is wide open in West Bengal

Neerja Chowdhury

Senior Political Commentator

THE one thing that can be said with certainty about the 2021 West Bengal elections is that the battle is going to be between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Left and the Congress that are forming an alliance may get squeezed out. Often, a triangular fight goes to the advantage of the ruling party, for it tends to divide the anti-incumbency vote. This, however, looks difficult in West Bengal. There is a large concentration of Muslims (27-30%), and the TMC, Left parties and the Congress are going to be claimants for this vote bank. So will Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, which plans to contest the polls, and this could be to the BJP’s advantage. Given the large population of the Muslims, the state could be more susceptible to polarisation along Hindu-Muslim lines.

The second thing that can be said with equal certainty is that the BJP is the ascendant force in West Bengal, and Mamata Banerjee is on the back foot. The party which had got only three (out of 294) seats in the Assembly elections of 2016 won 18 (out of 42) Lok Sabha seats in 2019. This translated into a lead in around 125 Assembly segments, and 40 per cent vote share. Mamata’s TMC had won 22 Lok Sabha seats and got 44 per cent of the popular vote in last year’s General Election. So, a 4-5 per cent increase in the popular vote for the BJP should be a clincher for the party. But the moot question is: will it be able to retain 40 per cent popular vote in an Assembly election?

An Assembly poll is very different from a national election as local issues come into play much more. The TMC has the advantage of having ‘Didi’ at its helm; the BJP has no known chehra to lead it.

What’s more, the states which went to the polls after the last General Election did not replicate the 2019 results, be it Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Delhi or Bihar. In Bihar, a newbie, Tejashwi Yadav, posed a formidable challenge to the BJP-JD(U) combine, which just managed to scrape through. In Maharashtra, the BJP’s ‘betrayed’ poll ally Shiv Sena switched sides to form the government with the NCP and the Congress, and in Haryana, the BJP had to reach out to Dushyant Chautala’s JJP to retain power.

Barring Delhi, where Arvind Kejriwal retained his supremacy, the BJP was fighting anti-incumbency in the other states. This is not the case in West Bengal. It is Mamata who has to contend with the baggage of her 10-year rule. And the BJP has mounted an onslaught against her over corruption (Narada, Sarada, illegal coal mining), deteriorating law and order, her handling of the Covid-19 crisis, and her ‘appeasement’ of the minorities.

Putting its well-oiled poll machinery to work, a key nugget of the BJP’s strategy in West Bengal is to wean away TMC legislators to its side, particularly those who have a hold in rural areas. It is choosing them with care, and using pressure, playing on their unhappiness, and promising them greener pastures — all of ‘saam daam dand bhed’ — to get them on board. In 2017, it managed to get Mukul Roy, Mamata’s second-in-command, familiar with the party’s strengths and weak spots.

And now comes Suvendu Adhikari, with many others in tow, and their numbers may increase in the coming days. Adhikari had emerged as an important lieutenant of Mamata, with the family having a hold in East and West Midnapore districts, areas where the BJP is weak. He represented Nandigram, which had become a symbol of Mamata’s fight against the Left government and of her rise to power in 2011. Aligning with the BJP may lose him the minority vote in the area, but he might gain from the counter- Hindu consolidation that may take place. Many in the TMC have been put off by the rise — and role — of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee.

The third visible trend is the rightward shift that is taking place, for the first time, in the state known for its Left sensibilities. In order to get the better of the Marxists, Mamata had to ‘out-Left’ the Left in her two-decade-long fight against them, in her rhetoric and policy emphasis, repeatedly underlining the need for ‘food and employment for all’, encapsulated in her slogan ‘Ma, Mati and Manush’. Just as the Left parties had used land reforms — Operation Barga — to firm up their support base, Mamata also used the issue of land in Singur and Nandigram, when she fought fiercely against its acquisition for the Tatas’ Nano project.

Today, Mamata is doling out sops, like 3 per cent hike in dearness allowance, or free tablets to higher secondary students, both in schools and madarsas, or reducing the cost of the RT-PCR test for Covid-19. And yet this time, she is bereft of a grand theme.

The TMC has pitched it as an ‘insider versus outsider’ fight. Amit Shah is seen to be leading the campaign for the BJP in West Bengal, and has made several visits to the state. But so far, Mamata’s invocation of sub-nationalism, or an appeal to the sons of the soil, or to Bengali pride, hasn’t quite taken off. Nor is there an issue around which it has coalesced. For the moment, then, the game is wide open in West Bengal.

The BJP brass has over the months devoted its energies to West Bengal. Clearly, the capture of a large state would give an impetus to the BJP to move closer to its goal of creating a saffron-suffused, a one-party-dominant India, with Hindutva as its underlying ideology. But winning West Bengal may be important for another reason: to get the better of the feisty fighter called Mamata Banerjee who has taken on the BJP at the street level, more than any other leader in the Opposition.

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