Stopwatches For These Last Laps

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi addressed two rallies in North Bengal on April 14—one at Goalpokhar in Uttar Dinajpur district and the other at Matigara-Naxalbari in Darjeeling district—went back and announced that he would be addressing no more rallies in the state, keeping in mind the rapidly growing cases of COVID-19. Some hailed his decision, others said it did not matter since the Congress hardly had any prospect of coming to power.

To Congress leaders in Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur—Bengal’s three Muslim majority districts--it did matter. “It could have helped the Congress in protecting their vote-bank from swinging towards the TMC amidst a communally polarised atmosphere,” says Sk. Anisur Rahman, a grocery shop owner in the Suti assembly constituency in Murshidabad, the district with India’s highest Muslim population. It is also Bengal’s third-largest district, with 22 Assembly seats, where Muslims made up 67 per cent of its population.

In 2016, when the TMC returned to power with an overwhelming mandate, winning 211 of the state’s 294 seats, they won only four in Murshidabad--a bastion of Bengal Congress stalwart and former Lok Sabha leader of the party, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury. The Congress had won 12 and the Left four.

The equations have changed since then, with the TMC poaching on several Congress MLAs and Chowdhury-loyalists. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the TMC won two Lok Sabha seats, while Chowdhury managed to retain his seat. Of the 22 Assembly segments, the TMC led in 16, the Congress in five and the BJP in one.

“Muslims have consolidated further in favour of the TMC since 2019,” says Atikul Biswas, a tailoring shop owner in Samsherganj, Murshidabad. In 2019, Atikul had voted for the Congress. This time, he has reserved his vote for Mamata Banerjee, seeing her as the force that can resist the BJP.

Before a deadly second wave of the pandemic forced the BJP to decide, on April 19, to hold only small public “with not more than 500 people”, following the TMC’s decision to also curtail big rallies, concerns about Covid had little impact on campaigning in Murshidabad. There, two candidates died of coronavirus last week—the Congress’s Samsherganj candidate Rejaul Haque and the Left-Congress-Indian Secular Front (ISF) alliance’s Jangipur candidate Pradip Nandi. Yet the stakes are too high for the Congress and the TMC to allow any rel­axation in the campaign. For the former, it’s about saving their final bastion; for the latter, it’s about ret­urning to power.

Going by the 2019 LS poll trends, of the 54 assembly seats in North Bengal, the BJP led in 37, the TMC in 13 and the Congress in four. Of the 51 seats in the southwestern Bengal districts of Purulia, Bankura, Jhargram, West Midnapore and Birbhum, the BJP led in 35 and the TMC in 16. Thus, in these two regions, the BJP led in 72 of the total 105 seats; the TMC led in only 29. However, because only some seats are expected to witness triangular contests, with strong Left-Congress alliance candidates in the fray, the TMC expects to make significant gains.

The BJP, aware of the possibility of losing a few seats in the north and west, has focussed on winning south Bengal seats where the TMC led in 2019. They hope to make major gains from East Medinipur, East Bardhaman and Hooghly in particular. A wave of Hindu consolidation, evident from visits to these districts, makes the BJP’s hopes seem credible. Further, due to the presence of Muslim cleric Abbas Siddiqui’s ISF in South and North 24 Parganas districts, the BJP hopes to win a few seats with a sizable Muslim population.

“Consider the majority of the district as a lost case for the TMC,” says Tapan Samanta, a youth who runs a motorcycle repairing shop at Kolaghat town in East Medinipur district, which witnessed a rise of the BJP, banking on a wave created by different Hindutva org­anisations since 2018. After TMC heavyweight Suvendu Adhikary joined the BJP, he raised the Hindutva pitch, intensifying communal polarisation. The TMC faces a massive challenge here, where Muslims are only 14.59 per cent of the population. In 2019, the TMC led in 14 of the 16 assembly segments in East Medinipur, which were controlled by the Adhikary family. This time, the TMC’s share of seats may well be halved.

Similarly, a Hindu consolidation has put the TMC in a precarious position in Arambag subdivision of Hooghly district. In 2019, the BJP and the TMC led in two segments each. This time, the BJP seemed to be the favourite in all four seats.

It is these seemingly mutating equations in different regions of the state that keeps both camps, and even the majority of the state’s voters, guessing about the outcome of one of the most-talked-about and intensely-fought elections in post-Independence West Bengal. 

By Snigdhendu Bhattacharya in Calcutta