Two parallel realities seem to co-exist in West Bengal today. First, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s welfare schemes continue to shape the electoral discourse. You travel around the state, and there isn’t a household that’s not a beneficiary—of the monthly assistance of Rs 1,500 to Rs 1,700 for women under Lakshmir Bhandar Yojana, Rs 1,500 for unemployed youth, or cycles and smartphones for school students, among a host of others. The second reality is the talk of porivartan or change that keeps resonating, albeit gently. Fifteen years is a long time. A change may bring them more. But are they so unhappy with Didi that they want her to go?
I asked this question to a group of villagers—four women and three men—in Kastodanga village, about 70 km north of Kolkata, on Sunday afternoon. The women almost looked through me—at my naivete, I guess. A man in his twenties, however, nodded vigorously from his scooty: “You give Rs 18,000 to (unemployed) youth per annum, who have done BA, MA and MBA. They should be getting four times more per month, but there are no jobs.”
The others joined him in the conversation when he started talking about how the doctor at the nearby health centre came just for an hour twice a week, and they had to travel 26 km to get medical help in times of emergency. “Have you approached your MLA or MP about it?” I asked. The village is in Haringhata Assembly constituency, represented by Asim Kumar Sarkar of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It falls in the Bangaon Lok Sabha constituency represented by the BJP’s Shantanu Thakur.
“They never come back after the elections,” said another man. Asked if they felt the need for a porivartan in government, the scooty-borne man said, “They all just make money—first the Left, then the Trinamool Congress. Another one will surely do the same, but at least give them a chance.” The other man quipped, rather sharply: “Who—Suvendu Adhikari? He was Mamata Banerjee’s lieutenant all his life. How is he going to be any different?”
The penny dropped. The chief ministerial face remains an issue for the BJP. The party hasn’t declared a CM face, choosing to bank on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity again. Interactions with people in Kolkata, North 24 Parganas and Nadia showed his abiding popularity, but he hasn’t addressed the “Mamata vs who” question in their minds. It lingers even after PM Modi has addressed at least 20 public meetings and several roadshows, including one in Kolkata on Sunday that drew huge crowds.
But it’s not a Mamata vs. Modi contest. Didi’s real challenger is the BJP’s chief strategist, Home Minister Amit Shah. He has been camping in West Bengal for over two weeks, laying out an elaborate electoral trap for her.
BJP insiders told me that surveys by the Association of Billion Minds, a political consultancy firm, were making promising predictions. While their survey initially put the BJP’s tally at 95 in the 294-member Assembly, it went up to 120 last week. Party leaders are hopeful that it will cross the majority mark by the time the second and final phase of polling is over on 29 April.
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Anti-incumbency to SIR
According to BJP leaders in West Bengal, five factors are working against the Trinamool Congress. Fifteen years of anti-incumbency is on top of the list, of course. The second is ‘Hindu polarisation’ in a state with a 27 per cent Muslim population. “Mind you, it’s polarisation, not communalisation,” a senior party functionary told me. That explains the repeated references to Bangladeshi ‘ghuspaithiyas’ or infiltrators in BJP leaders’ speeches. The third factor they say is the ‘women’s safety’ issue, which came to the fore again after the RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident. The BJP has fielded the victim’s mother on the Panihati seat. The fourth factor, BJP leaders say, is the people’s ‘growing impatience’ with corruption—“from Nabanna (state secretariat) to village panchayats where nothing happens without cut money”— absence of industries and other avenues for unemployed youth, culture of violence and intimidation, etc. The fifth factor going against Banerjee is the anger of government officials who, BJP leaders say, are upset with the Trinamool Congress government’s refusal to implement the 7th Pay Commission.
When you travel in Bengal, these factors do surface in one form or another. I met a young, successful lawyer in Kolkata who was upset with his “woke” female colleagues who would proudly talk about eating beef. Murmurs about ‘Bangladeshis’ are getting louder, especially in urban areas. In a Nadia village, a Matua man whose mother’s name got knocked off the voter’s list sounded more upset about the fact that he was asked to pay Rs 15 lakh (as a bribe) to get a job for his wife, who has done MA and B.Ed. He didn’t name the bribe-seeker, but it wasn’t difficult to guess.
The biggest factor that BJP leaders are counting on but aren’t really upfront about is the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. It resulted in the deletion and exclusion of 91 lakh names from the voter list, accounting for around a 12 per cent decrease in the electorate. The deletions of six million names due to death, migration or duplication are usually seen as going against the Trinamool Congress.
A BJP insider, however, had a word of caution for me. “Our party underestimated Mamata Banerjee. In the initial phases of the SIR, lakhs of our voters had their names deleted. She had her people on the ground. We have been able to put out people on barely 65 per cent booths. We realised it much later. We did the damage control (ending up in the exclusion of 27 lakh voters), but the SIR hasn’t entirely gone our way as everybody thinks,” he said.
It may not be very reassuring to many Trinamool Congress leaders, given the scale of deletions, especially in Muslim-dominated constituencies.
They aren’t really fully into the game, though. Their election strategy was being managed by the political consultancy firm, I-PAC, under the direct supervision of Mamata Banerjee and her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee. The rest of the party works on a need-to-know basis. Following raids by the Enforcement Directorate, I-PAC suspended its operations for 20 days. Those associated with the consultancy firm, however, told me that they were anticipating it and “prepared accordingly”.
Also read: SIR aside, why BJP is not counting its chickens for a non-vegetarian CM in Bengal
An impending storm
Home Minister Amit Shah has laid out an elaborate plan in Bengal. To start with, personal attacks on Mamata Banerjee are a complete no-no for BJP leaders. It’s her government’s omission and commission that must be its focus. The Trinamool Congress’ attempt to use the ‘outsider’ tag against the BJP is being countered through careful deployment of leaders. A day after publishing its first list of 40 star campaigners in Bengal, the BJP dropped six of them who were from other states and replaced them with Bengalis. The final list had 15 Bengalis. The party keeps track of the number of meetings that “national” and “local” leaders address. For instance, until Saturday, BJP’s national leaders addressed 143 meetings as against 153 by local leaders (in Bengali).
The BJP’s biggest roadblock has been the minority-dominated seats, with one estimate suggesting Muslims constitute over 30 per cent of the population in 110 seats and over 40 per cent in around 75. If the TMC were to start with this tally, the BJP would be required to have a phenomenal strike rate in the remaining seats (294-110) to stay in the game.
A senior BJP leader, however, told me that there were only 49 seats where the Muslims were the “deciders” and “even out of that, we may manage to win a few”.
BJP leaders say that the heavy presence of paramilitary forces—around 2.5 lakh personnel—in the first phase ensured that the people came out fearlessly to vote. They believe that the near-absence of violence in the first phase would give confidence to more people to come out and vote in the second phase, and these new additions would go with the BJP.
When you drive through rural areas of West Bengal today, you sense an uneasy quiet, with parties’ flags fluttering from houses and shops. To break it, you have to poke the voters. They do have aspirations, but they don’t really look like they’re preparing for a revolution. BJP leaders see in this lull a sign of an impending storm. As I was leaving Kolkata on Monday afternoon, it was cloudy, but the breeze was quite gentle. There are still two days to go before the crucial second phase in which 142 constituencies will go to the polls.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)