How Trinamool played out BJP’s spin in Bengal
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has successfully shepherded her party to a convincing win in the just-concluded general elections. Before we start parsing the results, a word on the prognostications of the pollsters would not be out of place.
The exit polls almost unanimously had the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulling ahead of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) both in terms of seats and vote share. A “poll of polls”, for instance, gave the BJP 23 seats and the TMC 18. One exit poll predicted 26-31 seats for the BJP against 11-14 for the TMC, while also placing the respective vote shares at 46% and 40%.
The TMC won 29 seats against the BJP’s 12. The TMC’s vote share has risen from 43.3% to around 46%, while the BJP’s vote share has fallen from 40.7% to around 39%. The point of beginning with the exit poll projections is to highlight their failure to look at the situation on the ground.
A number of observers who have been keeping their ears to the ground foresaw a diminution of the BJP’s vote share and consequently their seat strength because of several developments leading up to the declaration of the elections on March 16 and subsequently during the nomination process and campaigning.
In the run-up to the announcement, it appeared that the BJP had decided to fashion its campaigning around February’s Sandeshkhali agitation, mostly led by women, against land grab, intimidation, physical assault, corruption and, crucially, the sexual oppression of large numbers of women, orchestrated by Sheikh Shahjahan, a local TMC functionary.
There was no real Plan B. Thus, when the state government moved, albeit a little dilatorily, to arrest the culprits and begin the process of restituting plots of land converted from agricultural fields to water bodies for pisciculture, some of the force of the campaign was blunted.
Then, when a series of sting videos emerged suggesting that the movement against sexual exploitation was orchestrated by state BJP leaders by offering inducements, alongside retractions of allegations of sexual abuse by several women, the TMC got a chance to draw the sting from the agitation. In fact, Banerjee sought, it now appears successfully, to paint the inducements as an attempt to dishonour Bengal and its women. Sandeshkhali is in the Basirhat constituency, which the TMC’s Haji
Nurul Islam won by a landslide despite being pitted against the BJP’s Rekha Patra, one of the leaders of the movement, whose candidature was endorsed by Prime Minister Modi.
It was debatable from the outset whether the Sandeshkhali issue would have a statewide resonance, given that Banerjee has created a redoubtable constituency among women by rolling out several welfare schemes specific to them.
The other string in the BJP’s bow was the education scam. But the TMC managed to neutralise that as well when the Supreme Court (SC) passed a verdict favourable to the government. On April 22, the Calcutta high court (HC) passed an order cancelling over 25,000 school jobs on account of irregularities in the hiring process though only a fraction of them had been contested in the first place. This gave the Opposition ammunition. The BJP tore into the TMC, without expressing sympathy for those who had lost their jobs.
On May 7, the SC stayed the order, citing precisely the fact that not all the jobs cancelled had been affected by the recruitment “scam”. This enabled the TMC to turn the issue into one of livelihood. After the HC order, Banerjee had said she would fight it and not allow people to lose their livelihood. After the SC order, she claimed vindication, painting the Opposition as unfeeling and alleging a nexus between the BJP and some HC judges. Her position gained credibility because Abhijit Gangopadhyay, the judge who had originally been trying some of the recruitment cases, quit, joined the BJP and was fielded by the party from the Tamluk constituency, the backyard of Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP’s leader of the Opposition. Gangopadhyay won with a margin of over 77,000 votes.
The BJP scored a few self-goals in the process of managing the elections in West Bengal. Their nomination process was slow, which gave the TMC an early-mover advantage. The nominations were quixotic in some cases as well, especially when winning candidates were shuffled around.
The strategy of bringing in star campaigners from outside and sidelining state leaders helped the TMC characterise the BJP as a “party of outsiders”, just as it did during the 2021 assembly elections.