West Bengal is the perfect case study to figure out what works best in the muddy waters of Indian politics: hyper Hindu nationalism or hyper strategising. And with the assembly election just a few months away, both the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata party have their A-game on. For the BJP, it’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah and party’s Bengal president Dilip Ghosh holding the fort with their vitriol. Challenging them is Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek and election strategist Prashant Kishor with their reorganisation of the TMC. What wins is anybody’s guess. While Amit Shah has claimed the BJP would get more than 200 seats in the 294-member assembly, Prashant Kishor has challenged it and said he will quit politics if the BJP even manages to cross double digits. Evidently, both are working tooth and nail to that end.
But their approach is poles apart.
The BJP is sticking to its vulgar hyperbole, relying on Hindutva, Bangladeshi infiltrators (read Muslims), talks of “revenge”, and insulting the ‘bhaipo’ of TMC – Abhishek Banerjee. The TMC is playing a subtle game. It is going the development way, speaking of a ‘Duare Sarkar’ or a government constantly in service at your doorstep. With 11 flagship welfare schemes directed at women’s empowerment, employment generation, health, community development and girl education, the TMC is trying to hem in Bengal voters with its own version of ‘vikas’. Both these campaign tactics are predictable. But what works in Bengal is not.
West Bengal is a curious case of ideologies. It’s as if people of the state change their core political leanings drastically every two decades. While the 1970s and the ’80s was dominated by the Left, the ’90s and the 2000s were led by the Congress-TMC’s centrist views. But now, Bengal seems to have taken a sharp Right-ward turn in the way it thinks politically. The huge gain in the BJP’s vote share in the 2019 Lok Sabha election – from 10.3 per cent (in the 2016 assembly election) to 40.3 per cent – in spite of Mamata Banerjee’s aggressive verbal takedowns of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is indicative of this trend. But Banerjee’s hold over her electoral vote base too cannot be ignored. Her party managed to retain 43.3 per cent vote share in 2019. This was at the peak of Narendra Modi’s popularity.
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Problems galore for TMC
There are several chinks in the TMC’s armour. While the BJP takes pride in being a favourable option for leaders being wronged by dynasts like the Gandhis and now the Banerjees, the TMC camp is beset by leaders disgruntled with Abhishek Banerjee and Prashant Kishor taking over the charge of party affairs. Already, big vote-getters like Mukul Roy, Sovan Chatterjee and Suvendu Adhikari have left the TMC. And the BJP is leaving no stone unturned to malign Abhishek the way it did Rahul Gandhi, calling the West Bengal government ‘pishi-bhaipo sarkar’ or the government of the aunt and her nephew.
These jibes at Mamata Banerjee affect her image of ‘Ma Mati Manush’ (mother, motherland and people). It was this image of a sincere woman clad in a white cotton sari and a rubber chappal working for her motherland and its people at the grassroots or ‘trinamool’ that helped her come to power. And the BJP is reinforcing this betrayal of a sincere woman who has turned into an autocrat trying to bring her nephew as the heir to her throne. Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat recently said that Mamata Banerjee has “cheated” the ‘Ma Mati Manush’ of West Bengal.
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The CAA-NRC bogey
But the BJP too is unable to hide the chinks in its armour. While the supportive media plays the defections from the TMC to the BJP on loop, no one seems to mention the man who owed the largest chunk of victory to the BJP in 2019 – fugitive Gurkha leader Bimal Gurung. His Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) quit the BJP-led NDA and is back with the TMC. Gurung, who brought the BJP to power in seven of the eight Lok Sabha seats in north Bengal in 2019, has now vowed to teach the BJP a lesson in the upcoming election.
There’s another factor that could prove disadvantageous for the BJP – the coinciding assembly election in Assam. BJP leaders, including Amit Shah, have repeatedly spoken of implementing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in West Bengal since 2019. The coinciding Assam election and the party’s “internal survey” – as a top leader told journalist Himadri Ghosh of The Wire – has made the BJP drop the pitch for now, with Amit Shah even turning evasive to journalists’ questions on CAA-NRC.
And so, Amit Shah has instead relegated Dilip Ghosh to target Mamata Banerjee and he is doing just that. Recently, Ghosh abused Mamata, calling her “bastard” and saying she was “trying to convert Bengal into Bangladesh”. But the CAA-NRC finds no mention anymore. Whether the people of Bengal are noticing this is up for speculation.
The Bengali pride of the Gujaratis is also amusing. While Narendra Modi is quite obviously fashioning himself after Rabindranath Tagore, which I had written about earlier, the BJP’s ‘star campaigners’ have a huge disadvantage of language when compared to the TMC. While Trinamool leaders are all homebred and true blue Bangalis, the BJP is relying completely on two Gujaratis to convince the people of Bengal that their culture will be celebrated. This, from people who are also hell-bent on imposing Hindi in the south and the northeast.
The author is a political observer and writer. Views are personal. Views are personal.
Just read the author s name..it would be enough…A JIHADI SPOTTED… report this article ?
Change is the only constant. It’s time, like the CPI before them, that TMC was shown the door and let another party a chance at governing, if only for a single term. After all, how bad would it be, considering the corruption, incompetence and destruction wrought by those two parties over the past six decades.
Jihadist posing as journalist will talk about gujrati versus Bengali versus Tamilian versus, and the list goes on , trying hard to divide HINDUS . As the consolidated “SECULAR VOTES ” who are in minority but will be majority soon get the party of AKBARUDDIN elected.
HOWEVER they jihadist posing as journalists will never discuss why people from their community are killing each other in thousands in the name of religion .
HINDUS must vote for a party which will not discriminate against HINDUS and protect their progressive culture from RIOTERS AND PROSELYTIZERS.
I understand the author’s sympathy towards Bangladeshi Muslims. But we do not want those illegal souls. End of story.
TMC Centrist? First joke of 2021
On one end we cry about division based on religion and other end we talk about division based on the region and language. What kind of sh** eating tongue it is to speak contradiction in the same sentence. Either you are naive and gullible or nefarious.
On one end we cry about division based on religion and other end we talk about division based on the region and language. What kind of shit eating tongue it is to speak contradiction in the same sentence. Either you are naive and gullible or nefarious.
The Real fight will be between two SECULAR PARTIES WHO DEPEND ON SECULAR VOTES who are in minority but will be majority soon.
HINDUS believe in education and science and prosperity and don’t believe in conversion but are considered INFIDELS by SECULAR PARTIES .
HINDUS will have to VOTE for survival and safety of their way of life and to protect themselves from RIOTERS AND PROSELYTIZERS.
CAA / NRC – one recalls reading – had been concocted for the Bengal election. So that is one major election plank gone. The promise to deliver Sonar Bangla – the Bengalis being intellectuals would not be moved by something as prosaic as Achhe Din – in five years would lead CM Mamata Banerjee, already a known presence on the national scene, to question what has been delivered across the country in seven years. Her nephew is a problem. Undoes a lifetime of simplicity.
This article smacks of the bias and agenda of the author. I will not even go into the absurd claims made here, except one (just as an illustration).
The author claims that Bimal Gurung of GJM brought BJP to power in 7 of 8 North Bengal seats. This is laughable for any Bengali who follows politics. Bimal Gurung was coerced into going back to TMC, through malicious prosecution of GJM activists (including Gurung), but Mamata’s pet IPS lobby. This is crystal clear to anyone who follows local media.
The BJP is fighting a unique election in Bengal. There is tremendous social churn due to a variety of factors. The one thing that makes the existing Left-Liberal establishment (yes TMC is very much Leftist, no matter how much paid columnists try to make it look centrist) so nervous, is the fact that Bengali society has always been divided on the basis of class, and not caste. CPI(M) (through its mass mobilisation wings targeted at different classes) managed to keep all classes fighting each other and at the same time supporting the party. TMC started blatant minority appeasement and promotion of its own goon cadre, thereby breaking this “class consensus”.
Lower class, lower caste Bengalis are the blue collar backbone of urban India now. These Bengalis are functionally literate, and are noticing how Bangalore/Hyd/Bombay can provide them better infrastructure and opportunity than their homeland.
They are noticing how Bengal’s development is throttled by an entitled, upper class, upper caste elite – which condemns the poor to a life of blue collar servitude, while their own children study in engineering colleges of TN/Kar/AP, and then clamour for H1B visas.
The BJP has correctly identified this fault line, and is trying to pull it apart. Bengali upper caste hegemony is being challenged. Hence, the establishment feels so threatened by the BJP is Bengal.
The author makes it clear who she is batting for. Not surprising at all.
TS Darbari – The BJP has been rising consistently in Bengal and is setting up for a direct contest with the ruling TMC in 2021 assembly election. The TMC, interestingly, has also been rising in Bengal. Still, CM Mamata Banerjee has looked rattled at the growth of the BJP in Bengal. Mamata Banerjee made frantic efforts to placate Suvendu Adhikari, who rebelled over the growing importance of her nephew Abhishek Banerjee in the TMC. Suvendu and nine other sitting MLAs joined the BJP last week. At a recent public rally in North Bengal, Mamata Banerjee in an impassioned appeal to the voters asked what wrong she did to lose all seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha seats in the region. #TS_Darbari #Ts_Darbari_Blog #TS_Darbari_News #Ts_Darbari_Views #Ts_Darbari_Blogger #TS_Darbari_Comments #Ts_Darbari_Opinion #About_TS_Darbari #TS_Darbari_Articles #Politics #Views #Comments #who_is_TS_Darbari #About_TS_Darbari #Who_is_TS_Darbari Who is TS Darbari?
Mr. TS Darbari is a top management professional, with several years of rich & diversified experience in Corporate Strategy, New Business Development, Sales & Marketing, Commercial Operations, Project Management, Financial Management and Strategic Alliances.
Pure trash article.
Lefties blame BJP for dividing on the basis of religion but they have no qualms doing it on the basis of language.
India does not see the PM as a Gujarati but as an Indian.
Shameful..
So Motabhai is certifying that the other half is Indian? I am impressed.