By Sujit Bhar in Kolkata
As the somewhat successful businessman sits back in his chair in his comfortable office, he wears an uncomfortable smile on his lips. He is a Jain by religion and a staunch Congress party supporter by choice. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) intrusion into Bengal has left no mark on his preferences. His family has been in Bengal for well over a century and he is clearly uncomfortable at the horse trading going on as much as he is uncomfortable with the Left Front’s alignment with a rabid semi-Islamist party, ironically called the Indian Secular Front (ISF), and he is completely dissatisfied with the economic failures of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). As the icing on the cake, he is also dissatisfied with the state of his favourite party, the Congress.
“There is a state of fear now, but more importantly, a state of complete confusion. We say the people of India are intelligent, they vote the right people into power, they choose well…do they?” he asks. This is a difficult question, especially in the context of Bengal, where politics precedes breakfast and even the morning tea, ending for a minor break with the nightcap. “Adhir Chowdhury (the state Congress chief) suffered too many personal problems. He had no help from the centre (aka Sonia Gandhi), and the entire grassroots network of the party has disappeared,” says the businessman. “Now the high command doesn’t sound that sensible either.” The dissatisfaction has not yet grown strong enough for him to tilt towards the BJP, but it is strong enough to start disliking his family dependence on the Congress.
At a tea stall near Patuapara, in south Kolkata, a stone’s throw from where Mamata lives, Janak (name changed) packs up his wares for the day. When he came here looking for work in the city, he gravitated towards the people he knew in the area. He was advised to try and meet Mamata, then the Union railway minister. Janak did and Mamata had helped him set up a small tea stall which has now grown quite a bit. Janak became a die-hard Mamata worshipper.
Not anymore. “Didi ke vote ditei hobe emon kono kotha ache? (Is there a dictum that I have to vote for Didi?) What has she done for us, those who toiled for her day and night? How has her bhaipo (nephew) Abhisekh suddenly grown to be her favourite and we are nobodys?” The worship has stopped, and when somebody you worship falls in your esteem, he/she falls hard. Bengal is, to sum it up, in a confused state.
BJP’s all out push for its Final Frontier control of the West Bengal assembly is getting murkier as poll dates approach. The state will see elections in eight phases, an unusual decision by the Election Commission by any standards, and the TMC, the ruling party headed by its charismatic leader Mamata, has claimed this has been planned by the Commission with active cooperation of the BJP. The BJP, on the other hand, feels this will probably allow the local party to keep a better toehold.
Meanwhile, the state is almost visibly awash with cash, being spent on recruiting muscle or on recruiting polling agents and publicity personnel, as well as politicians. The obvious question is: how is it that so much hard cash does the rounds before an election and none after? Poll promises, as usual, have been pouring out of party mouthpieces at random, and the general belief, as usual, is all are liars.
All of the above should point towards a typical pre-poll environment in any part of the country. Only, it is not. No level of prediction seems adequate, and Bengal’s poll strategist Prashant Kishore’s claim that he will leave this profession for good if BJP manages over 100 seats, is being taken with a large pinch of salt.
To be fair, the BJP has left no stone unturned this time, bringing in the duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah time and again for rallies. The confidence in the BJP ranks has swollen, as has the confidence within TMC ranks. Against the big guns of the BJP, the TMC refrain is, strangely enough, a BJP motto: “Vocal for Local”. A local leader a la Mamata that is, as chief minister. Herds of politicians have joined the BJP ranks in the recent past, yet the BJP candidates’ list presents a confused look, and there is no viable chief minister face visible. Every high-profile defector who joined the BJP ranks in Bengal holds deep in his heart the desire to be the chief minister. Only, the biggest possible catch that the BJP could have had former India captain Sourav Ganguly remained untouched and managed to slip out of the many overtures and threats that came his way. It now seems unlikely that Sourav will be able to keep his BCCI president’s post for long, but that is another story.
There is another similarity between the BJP’s big-gun show and Mamata’s Banglar Meye (the girl from Bengal) cry. While the BJP has failed to put up anybody worthy of being chief minister, defector and Medinipur strongman Suvendu Adhikari’s challenge to Mamata for the Nandigram seat has had the chief minister telling the people: “You will be voting for me, not any candidate, you look at me while you cast your vote.” By that logic, BJP’s idea of voting for Modi isn’t too far-fetched.
However, the BJP has come in for some level of bile from its long-time followers and workers. The party’s state president, Dilip Ghosh, has earned more sneers than adulation through his many obtuse comments, such as the one in which he claimed that desi cow’s milk had a percentage of gold in it. Such outrageous comments may hold water in some other states the BJP has rolled over, but not in Bengal. Hence old timers have had a tough time making an impression. The turncoats have firmly taken over the poll stage for BJP.
As the BJP rolled out its candidates’ list, some anomalies have come to the fore. The inclusion of Mukul Roy, once Mamata’s right hand man, is a case in point. Mukul is an organiser, a backroom worker, not a frontline political face. That would have been the best place for Mukul in the BJP, as evident in his engineering of the many defections. He understands underhand machinations better than people’s hopes and aspirations. Mukul is from a place called Jagatdal, the constituency being in his home district of North 24 Parganas. But as per the BJP’s list, he will be contesting for polls from the Krishnanagar North assembly seat in Nadia district. This will be the first time he will be contesting in a poll since 2001, when he had lost his home seat to a Forward Bloc candidate by over 13,000 votes.
Mukul had been railway minister once, and was a two-term Rajya Sabha MP (he resigned in 2017 and joined the BJP in November that year), but frankly, Mukul is not as much a vote catcher, as he is a defector-catcher. So why? People in the know have seen the profile of candidates being put up and say that this, the elections, is BJP’s first innings play. The rest is probably being left for after, when another set of defections could be engineered if the numbers do not look right. Technically, therefore, these elections are not the only play left in the BJP armoury. The entire charade of promises and counter-promises can collapse in the end, if money and muscle again take up pole position after the hustings.
So, khel abhi baki hai. What about the mahajotkichdi of the Indian National Congress, the Left Front and the newly-formed Indian Secular Front (ISF)? At a recent rally at the huge Brigade Parade Ground at centre of the city of Kolkata, ISF leader Abbasuddin Siddiqui carried with him a horde of seemingly rabid followers and the Congress high command was livid that the state body had lined up with this fringe outfit whose leader has had a controversial past. State Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury has been removed as one of the national spokespersons of the party and the usual Congress infighting is again out in the open. Quite like that businessman, old Congress supporters are thinking hard: is the party worth the effort?
The Left was known for its ideological position in Bengal, not any more. If there was one true secular party to have ruled the state, it was the Left Front. During its 34-year reign, the state’s economy was smashed to bits, there was complete mayhem within the industry and even the farm sector was on its last legs. However, if one has to go by a RAW report of those days, the Left Front possibly boasted the cleanest set of ministers in the country. One more thing that the state earned through these three decades, was its aversion to bringing religion and caste-based discrimination into the open. Apart from some marginal areas in certain rural and semi-rural zones, religion and caste based treatment of people have been looked down upon. That has entered the electoral genes of West Bengal. Therefore, the Opposition was greeted with a Jai Shree Ram chant, instead of a namashkar. The Left was looked up to, even in defeat. With its alignment with the ISF (which is anything but secular) this tag is being washed spotless with Nirma. This volatile mix is what the cavernous politics of Bengal is. Now, who knows best how to fish in troubled waters?
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