Once Upon a Time in West Bengal : Decoding the 2021 Verdict
I am writing this at a time when, apart from Covid-related news stories, reports of post-poll violence from West Bengal are doing the rounds in the media. It would be unfair to claim that none of those reports are substantial, or to be in a state of denial about them. Of course, rural Bengal has witnessed a spate of violence after the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) thumped to power with an increased majority on May 2, crushing the high expectations of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). However, some fake news pieces surrounding the sporadic flare-ups have also surfaced. The culture of political violence is hardly new to the state. Anyone acquainted with West Bengal’s political history, will testify to the same. But before coming to it, let us try to first analyse the verdict of this hard-fought state election, which had the political executive at Raisina Hill on their toes for months.
Out of 294 (292 polled) seats in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly (WBLA), AITC won 213, gaining two seats from 2016, BJP won 77, gaining 74 seats from 2016 and the Left-Congress-ISF alliance was reduced to a solitary seat (an Independent candidate won 1 seat), that too from its months-old partner ISF. With two erstwhile major political powers of West Bengal — the Left Front and the Congress — being left without any representation in the legislative assembly, West Bengal has become a dedicated two-party battleground for the BJP to tackle its strongest adversary — the AITC led by Mamata Banerjee.
POLITICS OF POLARISATION
As expected, religion turned out to be a very prominent factor in the election, with the campaign taking highly polarising turns, especially with the BJP trying to cement its poll plank of alleged Muslim appeasement and support to illegal immigrants by the AITC. It is more than clear that the Muslims of West Bengal, who constitute a sizeable 30% of the population, summarily not only rejected the BJP, but parked their faith in the AITC. The only noteworthy exception was Bhangar, a Muslim-dominated constituency in the South 24 Parganas district, where Naushad Siddiqui, ISF chairman and brother of cleric-turned-politician Abbas Siddiqui, held fort and defeated the AITC candidate by nearly 26,000 votes. Till the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, this 30% vote was divided between the AITC, the Left and the Congress. However, in 2021, several contentious issues like the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, news of ‘love jihad’ laws in BJP-governed states and a traditional air of mutual discomfort of Muslims and the BJP, resulted in the Muslim population overwhelmingly pressing the button in favour of the strongest force possible to resist the BJP juggernaut in West Bengal.
However, religion was not the only rallying factor. Caste was equally, if not more, important in this election. This is where ‘Subaltern Hindutva’ assumes significance. This was another, almost an academically calibrated poll plank for the BJP. It is an interesting term that has become popular in intellectual circles and does well to explain the BJP’s claim to ascendancy in the eastern state. It was almost a ‘masterstroke’ for the BJP to integrate caste, class and religion. The coinage refers to the Hindutva sentiments prevalent in the rural, non-bhadralok, poorer and non-upper caste sections of the state, which the BJP claims were suppressed by the AITC. This seems to be a prudent explanation of the BJP’s efforts at ramping up its last-mile penetration in a state where it was virtually non-existent even a few years back. BJP’s electioneering about such a smothered version of Hindutva, practically took off from the western and south-western parts of the state (Purulia, Bardhaman, Jhargram, Birbhum, Paschim Medinipur etc.) from where it won a significant number of Lok Sabha seats in 2019. In 2021 too, BJP performed well in this region. In fact, even in pockets of central and eastern Bengal where BJP either won or came second, a good percentage of their votes poured in from Dalit groups. But, it fell short of consolidating their support. E.g. according to the Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey, the Rajbanshis, a sizeable SC community in West Bengal, had voted for the BJP in droves in 2019. While the AITC had received only 8% of Rajbanshi votes in 2019, the BJP had secured 75% of them. But the community largely migrated toward the AITC in 2021, its share increasing to 38% and the BJP’s share declining to 59%. Similar trends were seen among Adivasis as well, 62% of whom had supported the BJP in 2019. Their support fell to 46%. So, the party failing to build over their 2019 performance in regions where there were a sizeable population of SCs and STs (including reserved seats) in 2021 signalled two consequences for the subaltern Hindutva narrative — one was that voters, at some level, might change their voting patterns in national and state-level polls and the other was that merely religious ambition and communal rhetoric are not sufficient to take street-level support to the ballot. A party must also have other things in place, a credible chief ministerial face, for example, whom these people could have trusted. The AITC also took note of the BJP’s 2019 improvements and redoubled their efforts to win back support in these areas. West Bengal Budget 2020 allocated schemes like ‘Tapashili Bandhu’ for SCs and ‘Jai Johar Prakalpa’ for STs. Moreover, broadly speaking, apart from successfully consolidating Muslim votes and denting BJP’s share of SC and ST votes, AITC also retained the lion’s share of the urban and semi-urban Hindu votes. In such a neck-and-neck scenario, Hindutva restricted only to the subaltern was definitely something that did not yield results as expected.
The Malda-Murshidabad Factor
Another factor pivotal to the incredible victory margin of the AITC, was its near-clean sweep of the Malda-Murshidabad districts. This was something unexpected because these were regions which were traditional strongholds of the Indian National Congress (INC). Malda is the district which was once the bastion of the Choudhury family, led by ABA Gani Khan Choudhury, who was the Congress MP from Malda for 26 long years. The current Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, represents Berhampore in Murshidabad. Malda and Murshidabad collectively contain 34 Assembly Constituencies (ACs). However, election to two of those ACs — Samserganj and Jangipur — were postponed. Both of those were won by the AITC in 2016. However, Malda and Murshidabad had together returned 27-out-of-34 seats to the Left-Congress alliance in 2016. In 2021, 26 of the 32 seats which went to polls, were swept by the AITC, while the remaining 6 went to the BJP. This effectively meant an increase of around 66.55% seat-share for the AITC in these two districts. This paradigm shift engineered by the AITC in central Bengal, another Muslim-dominated region, was historic. It will remain a bit difficult to imagine a Congress-mukt central Bengal in the assembly.
THE TURNCOATS OF BENGAL
The BJP practically fought the 2021 elections with a pack of turncoats from AITC. It was highly probable that a random selection of BJP candidates would lead to selection of more turncoats than old members, because among the pool of candidates fielded by the BJP, 148 (about 50%) were AITC turncoats. This systematic poaching of top leaders from the AITC was an understandable way to strengthen the state unit, given BJP virtually was devoid of strong local organisers. In its quest to rope in popular faces to compensate its lack of credible faces, the BJP further eroded its chances. The AITC called these people ‘Mir Jafars’ who had deserted the party for better incentives. Long-time lieutenants of the AITC like former Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee, former minister Suvendu Adhikari, former MP Dinesh Trivedi, former Bidhannagar mayor Sabyasachi Dutta, former Howrah mayor Rathin Chakraborty, seasoned MLA from Singur Rabindranath Bhattacharya, former minister Rajib Banerjee etc. jumped ship and at one point, the AITC did look like a pitiable and vulnerable lot. It was striking and unreal to see the country’s second-most powerful man going on a door-to-door campaign in Bhowanipore, alongside the local candidate Rudranil Ghosh, another AITC turncoat. It was because of these, gripes about political killings, overall claims of anti-incumbency and the strong images of the Prime Minister and the Home Minister addressing several rallies in remote and rural parts of West Bengal, that lead to a perception of the tide turning in favour of the BJP. However, as it is now evident, the people felt no compulsion to vote for turncoats who used to mobilise people in Didi’s name just a few days back, especially because the AITC offered the voters credible candidates against turncoats. The notable exceptions of AITC turncoats who emerged victorious were heavyweights Suvendu Adhikari, who defeated Ms. Banerjee in Nandigram in a very close encounter, and Mukul Roy, who had, in way, pioneered the stream of defections to BJP back in 2017.
EVERYONE, BUT ONE, WAS WRONG
All the exit polls for the 2021 West Bengal election turned out to be horribly wrong and far from the ultimate results. There can be many explanations as to why those surveys, including the much-exalted Axis My India, did not elicit correct responses, irrespective of methodology. Politics (and post-poll response) in West Bengal cannot be compared to that in any other state, and it was perhaps the first time that national poll surveyors had hit the streets of the state with such urgency, given that the party governing the country was a contender this time. No one has still quite understood the minutiae as to how exactly the AITC managed such a victory, despite all the discussions regarding anti-incumbency, the desire for change and a credible alternative in Mr. Modi’s brand of administration. After 1972, when the Congress under Siddhartha Shankar Roy had secured 216 seats in the WBLA, the 2021 seat share of the AITC is the highest secured by a single party in the state. But, 2021 also had someone who was planning every inch of Ms. Banerjee’s campaign. It was election strategist Prashant Kishor and his team at the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC). Though Mr. Kishor had an impeccable track record of successful election management, West Bengal 2021 was a different kind of a challenge. As early as December 2020, he had announced that if the BJP crossed double-digits in the state, he would ‘quit this space’. It was a tremendous thing to say, given the BJP’s might was on full display, and some high-profile defections were yet to take place. It only seemed logical to discard Mr. Kishor’s claims as ‘political rhetoric’, but when the numbers flashed on television screens on May 2, it became crystal clear that highly-paid exit poll surveyors and statisticians had failed to gauge West Bengal — something Mr. Kishor had successfully done four months ago. I-PAC, as a consultancy, cemented its credibility with its performance in managing a victory for its client, the AITC. From grassroots surveys in all the ACs to handling social media marketing and communications for the party, I-PAC did it all and exceeded expectations. I-PAC’s efficacious modus operandi was one in which associates of the organisation were spread across 294 ACs, dividing themselves into networks headed by points-of-contact. They tried to gauge previous voting preferences of constituents and tallied them with existing choices. The team worked on extensive data sets to derive conclusions regarding voter sentiments and designed the client’s (AITC’s) plan of action accordingly.
THE OUTSIDER
Finally, this election saw the rousing of sentiments linked to all kinds of identity. If religious raw nerves were struck by the BJP, the AITC successfully fomented the classic identity binary of ‘us’ vs ‘them’. When the BJP raised slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram!’, AITC supporters countered it with ‘Joy Bangla!’ The insider-outsider dichotomy was exploited well and the BJP was compared to the Marathas — called Bargis in local parlance — who attacked and plundered Bengal in the 18th century. While the BJP tried to assert that one’s identity of being an Indian should subsume all parochial identities, the AITC emphasised the BJP leadership’s dissonance with Bengali culture and customs, something essential for subnational governance. It was a barb that could not be easily ignored. The BJP’s entire campaign was controlled from New Delhi and in the absence of local mass leaders, the Prime Minister and the Home Minister had to take complete charge of the campaign. Moreover, even the grassroots organisation was left to non-Bengalis and non-residents like BL Santhosh and Kailash Vijayvargiya. This evidently did not inspire much confidence about the centralised governance the BJP would administer if it were to come to power.
POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Now that we have a broad understanding of what all took place during the elections, and how the state’s demography has responded, it might be prudent to take a look at political violence. Everything said and done, it is an undeniable fact, both arithmetically as well as emotionally, that the BJP emerged as the biggest gainer in the election despite losing badly. From 3 seats in 2016, it raised its tally to 77 in 2021 — a feat which leaves nothing about the BJP’s ascendancy in West Bengal in doubt. With the BJP injecting itself into rural Bengal, the micro-society will perhaps have new and rejuvenated units of functioning, notably religion and caste. One might have noticed that compared to pockets in northern India, West Bengal has generally been devoid of communal and caste-based violence. One reason for that might be the traditional lack of identity assertion of Bengalis attached to these units. Instead of these, the unit of a rural society in West Bengal was, and continues to be, the party. This was birthed by the supremely strong grassroots presence of the Left Front, and this regimented system came to be known as the ‘party-society’. The party, and hence politics, pervades rural life in Bengal and almost every aspect of life is dictated in one way or the other, by which party one supports. The source of any kind of violence is the difference between the powerful and the weak. So, the party being the unit of life, political violence became entrenched in the political culture of West Bengal. It has transcended party boundaries. Just like caste-based atrocities are carried out to assert the dominance of one caste over the other, political violence too walks on the same lines, merely replacing caste with party. Though there cannot be any quantitative study to measure it, but the ‘party-society’ is an important reason for a greater sense of political literacy among people in West Bengal. Political violence is a highly condemnable and detestable byproduct of the ‘party-society’. It is a khela (game) which no one should have a skin in. The recent spree of post-poll violence is not an exception. Violence, regardless of its source, should be shunned in totality and a greater space should be accorded especially to the weak and voiceless. The prevalence of peace is not only desirable but should also be non-negotiable. I would like to believe that electoral mandates are effective tools to enforce the same.
