Anti-Mamata wave

As the BJP wins 18 of West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, the Trinamool Congress government is under pressure with the parliamentary election being viewed as a precursor to the 2021 Assembly election.

BJP supporters celebrating the victory of their candidates at the State party headquarters in Kolkata on May 23.

West Bengal sprang one of the biggest election surprises. It was no secret that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress were battling strong anti-incumbency, but not many really expected the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its relatively weak organisational strength at the grass roots, to win 18 of the State’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, against just two it won in 2014. The BJP not only managed to retain those two seats, but also wrested 14 seats from the ruling Trinamool Congress and one seat each from the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The Trinamool, which won 34 seats in 2014, was reduced to 22 seats. The Congress could manage only two, against the four it won last time. The Left Front, which won two seats in 2014, failed to win a single seat this time.

The BJP left its mark all over West Bengal in its biggest seats haul ever in the State. It swept northern Bengal with seven out of the region’s eight seats and made decisive inroads into the south and the west—the domain of the Trinamool. Some of the strongest Trinamool bastions, including Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Balurghat, Medinipur, Jhargram, Purulia, Bankura, Bishnupur, Hooghly, Bongaon, Barrackpur and Ranaghat, fell under the saffron surge. Congress strongholds were also breached: the BJP won in the Malda North constituency and put up a close fight in Malda South.

Remarkably, the BJP’s vote share jumped from 18 per cent in 2014 to 40.25 per cent, a leap that has taken even some of the State-level party leaders by surprise. “We knew we would do well, but, frankly, the result has surpassed our expectations. Mamata Banerjee’s days in power are over from today,” said a BJP leader when the trend became clear. The subdued celebrations outside Mamata Banerjee’s residence were in stark contrast to the jubilation at the BJP headquarters in Kolkata and marked a departure from the usually raucous, green abir (coloured powder)-covered wild scenes of joy outside the Chief Minister’s house after every election since 2009. “There are more reporters here than party workers,” remarked a journalist present at the scene.

BJP closing in

The result has set the warning bells ringing for Mamata Banerjee. It has not only shattered her political ambitions at the national level, but also put a question mark on her own position of supremacy in the State. There are remarkable similarities between the general election of 2019 and that of 2009, which had turned out to be the harbinger of the Left Front’s fall. The 2019 general election is also being seen as a precursor to the 2021 Assembly election in West Bengal. Local issues and grievances proved to be crucial in the election to the Lok Sabha.

The discontent and anger against the Trinamool was apparent at the ground level. Resentment against the ruling party, rather than any endorsement of the BJP’s ideology, determined the pattern of voting. Even traditional supporters of other opposition parties chose to vote for the BJP as they felt the first priority was to oust the Trinamool. The BJP, which sensed the popular mood, made it a point, in its election campaigns spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, to stress on the overthrowing of Mamata Banerjee in 2021.

This election proves that the BJP is no longer just a “perceived” threat to the Trinamool. The Trinamool’s vote share has gone up from 39.7 per cent in 2014 to 43.29 per cent. Yet, its gap with the BJP’s vote share has narrowed to just 3 percentage points because the BJP’s vote share has risen to 40.25 per cent.

The BJP has also established a lead in 129 out of the 294 Assembly segments; the Trinamool has done so in 158. Of the eight Assembly byelections that were held along with the general election, the BJP won four, the Trinamool three, and the Congress one.

The ruling party must also deal with the prospect of massive defections to the BJP camp. Indeed, defections actually started before the election. “The important thing now is to take stock of the situation and keep our flock together, which may be a difficult task, given the prevalent political mood,” a Trinamool source told Frontline .

Shocking defeats

The Trinamool is particularly rattled by the defeats in seats that used to be considered unassailable fortresses of the party. It did win convincingly in many of its strongholds, including Kolkata (South), Kolkata (North), Diamond Harbour, Dum Dum, Jadavpur, Howrah, Uluberia, Kanthi and Tamluk. But in Hooghly it suffered a shocking loss as the actress-turned-politician Locket Chatterjee of the BJP defeated the two-time MP Ratna De Nag.

Upset in Hooghly

Hooghly was where Mamata Banerjee staged her comeback from the political wilderness with a prolonged and violent agitation against the forcible land acquisition for the Tata Motor’s small car project in Singur in 2006. The Tatas were forced to shift their prestigious project, while the Singur agitation gave Mamata Banerjee the image of a protector of the farmer. After 10 long years of court battle, it was a great victory for Mamata Banerjee when the Supreme Court ordered the land to be returned to farmers in 2016.

However, there was an undercurrent of disillusionment among a large section of the people, many of whom later began to feel that they had been used as pawns in a political game. Moreover, poverty, and the lack of employment in the region because of the absence of new industries, made some people perceive the departure of Tata Motors as not such a good thing. There were also reports of bitter faction feuds in the Trinamool in Hooghly.

Darjeeling

In Darjeeling, it was hubris on Mamata Banerjee’s part to believe that the people would accept the “peace” she had enforced with an iron hand in the hills and abandon the three-decade-old movement for a separate State of Gorkhaland. For the Chief Minister, winning this seat was a prestige issue. After the creation of the elected autonomous Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) in 2011, she claimed that she had successfully brought an end to the strife in the hills. Six years later, however, she sparked off a fresh round of violence by announcing the introduction of Bengali in the school curriculum in the hills. More than 10 people were killed in alleged police firing and the hills shut down for a record 104 days. Mamata Banerjee brought back an uneasy peace, but this time with police power and political intrigue. Bimal Gurung, the supremo of the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM), the single most powerful political force in the hills, was absconding to avoid arrest. He was replaced with Binay Tamang as the head of the GTA.

Solving the Gorkhaland deadlock, however temporarily, was always projected as one of the biggest achievements of the Trinamool government. “The hills are now smiling,” Mamata Banerjee never tired of saying. But her popularity dipped alarmingly as the people began to view Tamang as the State government’s puppet. Losing in the hills was not only a huge loss of face for the ruling party, but also an eye-opener.

The GJM’s Gurung faction and the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) lent support to the BJP candidate, Raju Bista, who won by over four lakh votes. To add insult to injury, the Trinamool’s candidate, Binay Tamang, lost to Neeraj Zimba of the GNLF, who was supported by the BJP. “On the one hand there is huge support for Narendra Modi, and on the other, people are fed up of Mamata Banerjee’s dictatorial ways both in the hills and the plains,” Abhijit Roy Choudhury, senior BJP leader from northern Bengal, told Frontline .

Western front

Jangalmahal, the contiguous forest area of Purulia, Bankura, Paschim Medinipur and Jhargram, was another success story for the Trinamool government, which took credit for freeing the region from the clutches of the dreaded Maoists and putting in place ambitious schemes for infrastructure development. Like the Darjeeling hills, Jangalmahal, too, was “smiling”, as Mamata Banerjee kept reiterating in public meetings. Yet, as in the hills, in Jangalmahal also the Trinamool has been completely wiped out. This election threw up certain paradoxes—the most unique being the Trinamool losing in regions where the State government’s development work is most visible. In the erstwhile Maoist-affected constituencies of Purulia, Jhargram and Medinipur, where the development work was most apparent, the anger against the ruling dispensation was most intense. The work done by the government was offset by the Trinamool leadership’s corruption and high-handedness, manifest at the grass-roots level. From the tea gardens of northern Bengal to the red-soil region of Bankura and Bishnupur, allegations of corruption and nepotism abound against the ruling party. Sensing a strong BJP wave in Bankura, Mamata Banerjee replaced the sitting representative, Moon Moon Sen, with the party heavyweight and State Panchayat Minister, Subrata Mukherjee. But even this wily veteran, known to be an expert in coming out of tricky electoral situations, lost to a relatively inexperienced Subhash Sarkar of the BJP.

In neighbouring Bishnupur constituency, Soumitra Khan, an erstwhile Trinamool MP who recently defected to BJP, won convincingly, even though a High Court order prevented him from campaigning in his own constituency. The Trinamool’s inner-party feuds played a key role in winning the seat for the BJP. Khan took a sizeable chunk of Trinamool workers and supporters with him when he left the Trinamool.

The Barrackpur constituency was another prestige seat that the Trinamool lost. The urbane and suave sitting MP, Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamool, also former Railway Minister, lost to Arjun Singh, a former Trinamool strongman of the region.

Panchayat election violence

The alleged violence and widespread rigging by the ruling party in the 2018 panchayat election apparently proved crucial in turning voters away from the Trinamool. More than 34 per cent of the seats in the rural elections were won uncontested as opposition parties claimed that they were violently prevented from even filing their nominations. Many of those who had managed to file their nomination later alleged that the ruling party had forced them to withdraw their nomination. All over the State, voters expressed outrage at not being allowed to cast their votes. “They did not let us vote in the panchayat election, so we will teach them a lesson in the Lok Sabha election,” a resident of Jhargram told Frontline before the parliamentary election.

Right from the time that Mamata Banerjee’s party first formed the government in the State, it has been trying to achieve an “opposition-free scenario”. The strategy has finally backfired. In a political atmosphere that had seen a comprehensive decline in the fortunes of the Left and the Congress, the Trinamool leader’s concerted campaigning against the BJP, Narendra Modi in particular, led anti-Trinamool voters to the conclusion that the BJP was the only viable opposition to Mamata Banerjee. Congress and Left supporters perceived the BJP as a better bet for driving out the Trinamool.

The noted psephologist Biswanath Chakraborty made an interesting observation. “It was not just BJP versus Trinamool, but also Mamata Banerjee versus Mamata Banerjee. The people were in a dilemma, as there was undeniable development. But along with that, there was corruption and terror perpetrated by the ruling party at the grass-roots level. In this conflict, development ceased to be a factor for a large section of the voters, as was evident,” he told Frontline .

Left and Congress debacle

The elections dealt a particularly heavy blow to the Congress and the Left. The Congress lost its traditional bastions of Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur and its vote share dipped from 9.58 per cent in 2014 to around 5.6 per cent. The party strongman from Murshidabad, Adhir Ranjan Choudhury, managed to retain his Berhampore seat for the fifth consecutive time; the two-time MP from Jangipur, Abhijit Mukherjee, son of former President Pranab Mukherjee, came a distant third in the seat this time. Even in Muslim-majority Jangipur, the BJP was ahead of the Congress.

In Malda, a Congress fortress where the legendary Ghani Khan Choudhury and his family reigned unchallenged for decades, the BJP registered a surprise win in Malda North seat. The BJP’s Khagen Murmu defeated the Trinamool’s Mausam Noor, the sitting MP from the Choudhury family who recently defected from the Congress to the Trinamool. Mausam’s cousin, Isha Khan of the Congress, came third, marking an end to the Congress’ uninterrupted winning streak in the constituency. Polarisation of voters along religious lines and division of Muslim votes enabled the BJP to win this Muslim-majority constituency. In Malda South, the Congress’ Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury survived a scare from the BJP and finally pulled through with a margin of just 8,222 votes. The BJP’s Sreerupa Mitra Choudhury, and not the Trinamool candidate, came second in the seat, also a Muslim-majority one. For the first time since the formation of the CPI(M) in 1964, the party did not win a single seat in West Bengal. The CPI(M)’s vote share plummeted from 22.9 per cent in 2009 to 6.28 per cent this year. The Left’s drop in vote share turned out to be the BJP’s gain, as the bulk of the anti-Trinamool votes went to the BJP. Of the two seats that the CPI(M) won in 2014, it lost Raiganj to the BJP and Murshidabad to the Trinamool. In Raiganj, the sitting candidate, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Mohammad Selim, came third. Here again, polarisation along religious lines helped the BJP.

Religious polarisation

The BJP has undeniably put up an impressive performance in West Bengal. Yet, the question remains how much of the credit goes to Mamata Banerjee’s errors of judgment. At a simplistic level, it can be said that an anti-government feeling coupled with a huge polarisation along religious lines fuelled the BJP’s success. But to understand how a party with negligible organisational base at the grass-roots level could pull off this stunning performance, one needs to look more towards the Trinamool than the BJP.

While there has always been an undercurrent of communal tension in West Bengal, it was rarely allowed to come to the surface in the 34 years of Left Front rule, mainly because of the then State government’s policy of maintaining equidistance from all religious matters. When the Trinamool came to power, however, that policy changed. The Muslim vote had played a key role in bringing Mamata Banerjee to power in the State, where Muslims account for around 30 per cent of the electorate. The Trinamool leader felt it was essential not to lose even a bit of the Muslim support. Her attempt to consolidate minority votes led her to decisions that left her government vulnerable to allegations of “minority appeasement”. She was perceived to be blatantly playing the religious card in her politics.

Soon after assuming power in 2011, she announced a monthly honorarium to imams, who lead prayers in mosques, and a stipend to muezzins, who perform the task of calling the faithful to prayer. Much to the embarrassment of the State government, this decision was later struck down by the Calcutta High Court as “unconstitutional”.

The Chief Minister could often be seen sharing the dais with Muslim clerics and radical religious leaders at public meetings. She also appeared to be allowing Muslim clerics to dictate terms to her.

The image thus fostered was alienating a section of her Hindu supporters. Matters came to a head during Durga Puja in 2016 and 2017 when the Chief Minister ordered the postponement of the immersion of the idol as the date coincided with Muharram. Even the Calcutta High Court came down heavily on the State government, saying: “There has been a clear endeavour on the part of the State government to pamper and appease the minority section of the public at the cost of the majority section without there being any plausible justification.”

The BJP admits that this marked a turning point in its political fortunes in the State. “Our organisational strength was around 6 per cent at that time, and yet we felt our support base getting stronger thanks to the Trinamool’s blatant and shameless policy of Muslim appeasement,” said a senior BJP source.

With the forces of Hindutva getting stronger in the State, communal clashes became more frequent, and the State government’s inability to prevent them more apparent. Mamata Banerjee’s idea of trying to beat the BJP at its own game also turned out to be self-defeating. Her attempt to counter the programme of Hindutva pushed by the Sangh Parivar with what she called “soft” Hindutva only made the ground stronger for her new opponents. Her insistence on countering the Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti rallies brought out by various Hindu organisations with similar rallies of her own only made what had been culturally alien to Bengal a familiar yearly phenomenon accompanied by communal clashes.

Modi vs Mamata

There was much at stake for both the Trinamool and the BJP in this election. The BJP, wary of what then looked like a possible setback in northern India, pinned its hope in balancing the deficit by gaining more seats in the east. Mamata Banerjee, on the other hand, set her eyes on New Delhi and took the initiative to organise a grand coalition of parties opposed to the BJP. It was also a fight for survival in her own State, with the BJP rapidly gaining strength. It was one of the most bitterly fought political battles in West Bengal, with the two party icons, Mamata Banerjee and Modi, going at each other with a viciousness hardly ever witnessed in campaigning. High-pitched political rhetoric soon gave way to strident personal attacks that appeared juvenile at times. Right until the end, Mamata Banerjee insisted that the Trinamool would win all 42 seats in the State.

After the results were declared, there was silence from the normally loquacious Trinamool supremo. All she said through a social media message was: “Congratulations to the winners. But all losers are not losers. We have to do a complete review and then we will share our views with you all.”

Mamata Banerjee, clearly, will have to put aside her political ambitions at the national level and focus on retaining power in the State.