BJP’s Bengal blues

Weak organisation, infighting and failure to penetrate Bengal’s socio-cultural traditions drive the saffron party’s decline in the State.

BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari addressing a press conference in Kolkata on July 16. His uber Hindutva card has proved ineffective.   | Photo Credit: Saikat Paul/ANI

In 2019, the BJP burst onto West Bengal’s political stage by winning 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats and securing over 40 per cent of the votes. With the ruling Trinamool Congress reeling under allegations of corruption and misrule, the saffron party seemed poised to take over power from Mamata Banerjee’s party in the Assembly election of 2021. Five years later, while the Trinamool continues to struggle with corruption, the BJP’s fortunes have taken a drastic turn for the worse. The recent Lok Sabha election and the four subsequent Assembly byelections indicate that even with the Trinamool smarting from fresh allegations, the BJP has been unable to stem the rot in its party, let alone take advantage of its opponent’s discomfiture.

The BJP’s parliamentary seat tally fell from 18 in 2019 to 12 this year, and its vote share from 40.7 per cent to 38.73 per cent. It lost byelections in all four Assembly seats, including Bagdah, Raiganj, and Ranaghat Dakshin, which it had won in the 2021 Assembly election. Curiously, in the recent Lok Sabha election, the BJP had a clear lead in these three Assembly segments that fall under the parliamentary constituencies of Bongaon, Raiganj, and Ranaghat, respectively.

The BJP has alleged rampant rigging and terror tactics. According to the BJP’s chief spokesperson from Bengal and Rajya Sabha MP, Samik Bhattacharya, the BJP has borne the brunt of the Trinamool’s intimidatory tactics and use of force. “The politics of West Bengal has become completely different from the rest of the country. The Trinamool has borrowed terror tactics from the CPI(M) and has given it an even more terrible aspect. If the Left used ideology as a political tool, the Trinamool uses only terror. In the Lok Sabha election, we had a lead of 46,000 votes in the Raiganj Assembly segment; barely a month later we lose that very seat by 50,000 votes, a one lakh vote transfer! Is it believable? But even now the BJP is still getting votes,” he told Frontline.

Indeed, local leaders of the Trinamool have given themselves away by their words and behaviour. Nevertheless, there are major problems within the saffron party that has precipitated its downward spiral in West Bengal. Even Samik Bhattacharya conceded that changes in approach were required and “only Mamata-bashing on social media is not enough”.

BJP’s growth does not match the RSS’s expansion in Bengal

While it is true that the Trinamool, like the CPI(M) before it, tries to establish an “opposition-free” scenario in the State, the BJP’s failure to strengthen its organisation is one of its biggest problems. A top BJP leader from the State, speaking to Frontline on condition of anonymity, said: “On paper, we may claim our organisation is strong, and we have presence at the booth level, but the fact is we are organisationally not strong enough to take on the Trinamool. The reason is factionalism in the party. This comes to the fore especially when distributing tickets. It has caused rifts among the workers. On the other hand, the Trinamool is a strong organisation and, being the ruling party, has shamelessly used the administration and the police to subdue the opposition.”

Supporters of the BJP Mohila Morcha protest violence against women, in Kolkata on July 13.  | Photo Credit: Saikat Paul/ANI

The RSS has, however, been growing in strength in West Bengal. According to Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, author of Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment, RSS shakhas have more than doubled from 800 in 2011, when the Trinamool first came to power, and “its smaller organisations have grown exponentially”. “The smaller mass organisations of the RSS that quietly work as NGOs with innocuous names have been spreading across the State. Some may be training women in tailoring, some may be education centers, self-help groups, etc. It is very difficult to assess this growth, but it is massive,” he said.

Mired in controversies and corruption charges, the Trinamool has repeatedly presented the BJP with issues on a platter, and every time the BJP has failed to capitalise on them electorally. Even as Central investigation agencies arrested top Trinamool leaders, including Ministers and MPs, for alleged involvement in various scams, the BJP’s shrill rhetoric and condemnation made little impact on the ballot box. Ahead of the Lok Sabha election, the ruling party was rocked by the School Service Commission recruitment scam, the ration scam, and protests by the women of Sandeshkhali island. Yet the BJP ended with fewer Lok Sabha seats than in 2019. Days before the byelections to the Maniktala, Bagdah, Ranaghat Dakshin, and Raiganj Assembly seats, the country was shocked by videos showing goons allegedly close to the Trinamool mercilessly thrashing women when presiding over a kangaroo court. The BJP still lost all four seats.

This inability to politically exploit the many opportunities it has been given also perhaps indicates a lack of commitment among a section of BJP leaders. A district-level BJP leader admitted that if Mamata Banerjee were in their place today, “the government would have fallen long ago”. In fact, during the Lok Sabha election campaign, an optimistic BJP worker had remarked: “The Trinamool is enmeshed in so much corruption… if we cannot beat them now, then I don’t know when we can.”

Highlights

• The BJP’s rise in West Bengal seems to have fizzled out, with its Lok Sabha seats dropping from 18 to 12 and vote share dipping from 40.7% to 38.73% between 2019 and 2024.
• Despite the ruling Trinamool Congress facing corruption scandals, the BJP has fumbled opportunities due to infighting, weak grassroots organisation, and failure to connect with Bengali cultural identity.
• The saffron party’s reliance on “Modi magic” and north Indian political symbols has backfired, leaving it struggling to establish itself as a viable alternative to Trinamool.

While the Trinamool has been accusing the BJP of using the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate as tools of political vendetta, there is a growing murmur among a sizeable section of the electorate about a “secret pact” between the Centre and the State, and the BJP is wary of it. “There is a perception that only the relatively smaller fish are being caught by the Central agencies, while the big names in the Trinamool are being spared. This has planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the people, some of whom feel that there may be a secret understanding between the central BJP and the Trinamool,” said a BJP leader.

Lack of unity in BJP

The BJP’s lack of unity is one of the biggest factors hampering its growth in Bengal. It stems from a constant tussle between the adi (old) BJP and the nobbo (new, read turncoats from the Trinamool). This strife is reflected in the constant underlying friction between senior State BJP leaders such as Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, who defected from the Trinamool ahead of the 2021 Assembly election, the State party president Sukanta Majumdar, and former president Dilip Ghosh. In certain areas, the conflict between the old-timers and the new entrants is more intense than even the party’s rivalry with the Trinamool.

This strife at the top level has often impacted the BJP’s electoral prospects seriously. Dilip Ghosh, after his defeat in the Lok Sabha election, alleged that there was a “conspiracy” to defeat him. Ghosh, who was the sitting MP from Medinipur, was made to contest from Bardhaman-Durgapur. “Everyone knows that I was removed from Medinipur because of backstabbing. In the process of trying to defeat me [from Bardhaman Durgapur], we lost the Medinipur seat also,” said Ghosh.

Another top BJP leader told Frontline: “There is a saying that the new bride, however honest, is never immediately entrusted with the keys to the family locker by the in-laws. The leaders of our party have given the new bride the key to the locker.... The party was in a good position, and he started shuffling people around to promote his own people. This destroyed our chances in so many seats.” He refused to spell out who he was referring to. “Your perceptive readers will know,” he said.

A “north Indian” party: the cultural barrier

The perception that the BJP is essentially a “north Indian party” is another stumbling block. Unlike in Odisha, where the State BJP moulded itself to adapt to the local culture and the chant of “Jai Shri Ram” was substituted with “Jai Jagannath”, the BJP in Bengal failed to penetrate the cultural barrier. In a State where Ram was never among the prominent deities worshipped by the local populace, the “Jai Shri Ram” chant remained only an anti-Trinamool political tool. The BJP could not use it to coax any actual endorsement of its ideology. The Trinamool, on the other hand, made effective use of the BJP’s perceived “alien culture” and made Bengali identity its battle cry. This explains why the BJP’s growth in the State does not match that of its parent organisation, the RSS.

Victims of post-election violence in West Bengal at a protest organised by the BJP near Raj Bhavan in Kolkata on July 14. | Photo Credit: PTI

According to the sociologist Surajit C. Mukhopadhyay, the political symbols used by the BJP are so ingrained in the culture of north India that they fail to resonate in West Bengal. “How to send its political message across in a manner that is central to Bengal’s culture is something that the BJP has to ponder upon.... Moreover, the major BJP figures are Trinamool turncoats, and sociopolitically, people do not like turncoats,” he said.

While religious polarisation has ensured the BJP a captive vote bank, it is clear that this alone will not bring it electoral triumph. The Muslim vote (the community makes up 27 per cent of the population) has leant overwhelmingly away from the BJP, while the Trinamool’s welfare schemes help it retain Hindu votes.

BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari recently alienated Muslims further by going against the central party line and saying there was no need for “sabka saath sabka vikas. We are with those who are with us.” Embarrassed party leaders quickly distanced themselves from his statement. Speaking to Frontine, the State BJP’s Minority Morcha president, Charles Nandi, said: “What Suvendu Adhikari said has nothing to do with our organisation. Suvendu Adhikari is just the LoP. We are not deviating from our road map. Moreover, the Prime Minister said we have to serve the Muslims without expecting any votes. The BJP does not believe in doing religion-based politics.”

Until 2014, the BJP’s vote share was a mere 4-6 per cent in West Bengal. A strong Modi wave pushed it to 18 per cent in the 2014 Lok Sabha election and 40.7 per cent in 2019. With the fortunes of the Left and the Congress plummeting, the BJP became the main opposition with little effort of its own. “We happily rode the pro-Modi, anti-Mamata wave,” a senior BJP leader had earlier told Frontline.

However, not having risen through any major political movement and not having built a connect with the masses at the booth level, the saffron party soon hit the doldrums and a downward slide began. “Since 2019, the BJP has not been able to expand. It has failed to convince the electorate that it is a viable alternative to the Trinamool. The Lok Sabha and byelection results show that the party failed to evolve its leadership both at the State and the local levels,” said the psephologist Biswanath Chakraborty.

With the “Modi magic” now fading fast, the West Bengal BJP can no longer hope to be carried to victory on the strength of assurances of its leaders in Delhi. Though it still remains the main opposition in the State (albeit a distant second to the Trinamool), with every successive election it is losing more and more political ground. Unless it comes up with new ideas, the gap between the ruling party and its main opposition will continue to widen. A time may come when the term “opposition” may be reduced to a formality in Bengal politics.