Sometimes, what is left unsaid is so much more telling than what is.
That’s what marked the opening bout of 2024 Lok Sabha election contenders Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi. The two leaders addressed rallies in north Bengal on the same day, within minutes of each other and barely 25 kilometres apart. They attacked each other in the strongest possible terms on issues ranging from the Citizenship Amendment Act to Enforcement Directorate raids. But neither uttered a word about the most controversial issue this season: electoral bonds.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are the two biggest beneficiaries of the bonds, after all.
Hamam me, as they say, sab nange hain (Everyone’s naked in the bathhouse).
Wresting control of north Bengal
The two leaders chose to focus on more pressing demands: wresting or retaining control of the eight Lok Sabha seats in north Bengal that have habitually demonstrated they have a mind of their own and refused to become groupies.
Even in the 34-year Communist reign in West Bengal, these eight seats – one each in Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, North and South Dinajpur and two in Maldah – swung between the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), the Forward Bloc, the BJP and the Congress. When TMC splashed on the scene in 2009 with 19 seats, it didn’t get even one from north Bengal. It made inroads in 2014, hauling four of the eight seats. But in 2019, north Bengal evicted TMC entirely. Congress got one seat and the BJP seven.
Results of the panchayat elections of July 2023 gave TMC a shot in the arm. In five of the eight districts, it improved its vote share while the BJP’s slipped. All of this has made north Bengal a very rocky playground for all competing political parties.
That is possibly why on Thursday, Modi came to the region for the second time in less than a month – he had visited Siliguri on 9 March. North Bengal gave his party seven of the 18 seats it had bagged in 2019 and he can’t risk the TMC recovering lost ground in his party’s territory.
Banerjee arrived on Sunday. Hours after kicking off her election campaign at Mahua Moitra’s Krishnanagar seat that day, the West Bengal chief minister rushed upstate to handle the fallout of the mini tornado in Jalpaiguri district that left five people dead. And, of course, to launch her north Bengal campaign.
Modi scored a big minus on the tornado issue. He didn’t say a word about it despite the tornado hitting barely 125 km from the site of his public rally. However, Banerjee made the most of it, demanding the Election Commission to permit the administration to build houses for the hundreds of people that the tornado left homeless.
The prime minister harped on Sandeshkhali instead. He expressed sorrow over the exploitation of Bengal’s women by TMC-backed criminals, promising punishment to perpetrators. Banerjee, on the other hand, said not a word on Sandeshkhali. Predictably. Modi’s miss was a surprise. His speech writers are usually much more meticulous. Sandeshkhali is 600 km south of where he was. The tornado hit just over 125 km away.
The speech writers did make one major correction, though. They dropped a promise that Modi was making in recent addresses to party workers in Bengal: the promise to return to the people the money the ED had seized in corruption cases it is probing in the state.
Now, the promise of putting Rs 15 lakh in every Indian’s bank account is still ringing loud and clear in ears across the country. Adding insult to injury, he told Amrita Ray, the BJP candidate from Krishnanagar, over the phone: “You please tell the public that you have spoken to Modiji and he has said that the people of Bengal should believe that the Rs 3,000 crore attached by the ED will be returned to them.”
He repeated this plan on Wednesday in an address to party workers in Bengal over an app. Both the clips were widely circulated and have met with derision.
This promise to distribute Rs 3,000 crore is even taller than the Rs-15-lakh-in-every-bank-account one. Voters in Bengal won’t appreciate being taken for fools. The TMC is already making hay out of this piece of unsmart propaganda. Banerjee told her rally in north Bengal that if Rs 3,000 crore is distributed among the state’s entire population, each person would get a handsome sum of Rs 21.
Banerjee doesn’t have speech writers or any time for such things. But perhaps she could appoint a minder. Someone who could make her rethink some of her punchlines. At Mal, at the end of her election speech, she asked the candidate to come forward, held his hand and lifted it high in the usual fashion, saying: “Hirer tukro chele (a piece of diamond he is)”.
And then a faux pas. “Remember my face,” she said, “and give him [the candidate] a vote”. In Bengal, a standing joke about the TMC is: there is only one post; the rest are lamp posts. But did she have to rub it in?
Modi gave his candidate a little more due. But some of his dialogues were so filmy that they drew applause from some and sniggers from others. Some listeners may have even heard an ominous ring.
“Whatever development you have seen in the last 10 years was only a trailer….” he said.
Left unsaid: “Picture abhi baki hai (the movie is still left).”
Remember, sometimes, what is left unsaid is so much more telling than what is.
The author is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)