Battle for Bengal: Bet it will be bitter and close but for the winner, all bets are off

As election campaign in the state moves into the last lap with announcement of the dates by the EC, the only certainties are that it will be close, bitterly fought election with no cakewalk for anyone

Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@derekobrienmp
Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@derekobrienmp
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Uttam Sengupta

It is an existential election for all parties in the fray in West Bengal in 2021. A defeat will be a major political setback. Defeat by a large margin will be a catastrophe; which is why this is like no other election held in the state till now. Each party realizes the importance of 2021 and how high the stakes are. To borrow a phrase from one of Mamata Banerjee’s earlier campaigns, it is ‘now or never’. The only difference is that the situation is equally dire and grim for every party in the fray. Nobody can afford to lose.

This election is also important because unlike in Bihar last year, this is much more of an ideological battleground. The idea of a liberal, secular, plural and federal India is pitted against the idea of a strong, unitary and even authoritarian Hindu Rashtra. Mamata Banerjee, possibly not very wisely, has pitched it as a battle between Bengalis and outsiders. It is a battle for Bengal’s soul, she has declared. At another level, it will be a battle between two popular, authoritarian and populist leaders. Whoever loses will see this as a major, political setback.

The desperation of the BJP to ‘conquer’ and not just win the Bengal Assembly election is matched by the intensity of the survival instinct of the other three major parties in the fray. Trinamool Congress, the Left and the Congress, parties which dominated Bengal politics over the last two decades, are for the first time facing an existential threat from a resurgent BJP.

If Trinamool Congress loses the election, more so if it loses badly, it will face a real threat of an exodus, a split and even the party folding up. If BJP lose, and loses badly, it will affect the stability of its coalition in adjoining Bihar and will also have an impact on the ‘Mood of the Nation’. And for the weakened Left and the Congress, it is important that they hold their ground.

In the outgoing Assembly of 295 Members (including one nominated member from the Anglo-Indian Community), Trinamool Congress had won 211 seats in the election held in 2016 and added to the number through defections. In contrast, BJP had won three seats, Congress 44 and the Left Front 26.

Observers and opinion polls agree that the BJP, which had won 18 Lok Sabha seats from the state in 2019 and had led or come second in 164 Assembly constituencies, will dramatically increase its tally of three from 2016 and that it will be difficult for Trinamool Congress to repeat its 2016 performance in 2021.


But there the certainties end. Can BJP realistically win 150 seats on its own? Can Trinamool Congress fall below 140 seats? How many seats will the Congress-LF-Secular Front of India on the one hand and the AIMIM on the other manage to win? Even more importantly, who are they going to damage more? There are no easy answers to these questions.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a three-cornered contest will benefit the BJP and work against Trinamool Congress. Most political observers however seem to believe it will be a direct contest between Trinamool Congress and the BJP. Even die-hard Left or Congress supporters, they suggest, will be tempted to vote for the BJP because in popular perception, it is the party which is more likely to unseat Mamata Banerjee. In this election votes will be cast either in favour of Mamata Banerjee or against her, they assert.

BJP is, not surprisingly, ahead in creating the impression that it has already won the election. A steady stream of defections from the ruling Trinamool Congress, of both ministers and MLAs, have helped strengthen that impression. A section of the mainstream media too has bought into the narrative and are convinced that Bengal is ready for change. Growing feeling among a section of people that the state has suffered because since 1977, barring periods of coalition governments at the Centre, the state has not been governed by the ruling party at the Centre. BJP’s lure of ‘double engine growth’ has converted this constituency, observers suggest.

Other factors working in favour of the BJP in West Bengal are its seemingly unlimited resources, high voltage campaign by the PM, union ministers and chief ministers, its sway over the media and its wooing of Bengali film industry and holding out the promise of growth and investment.

But BJP’s organizational weaknesses on the ground, its almost vulgar display of money power, its brazen use of central agencies and its U-turn on the alleged Sarada-Narada scams, which were the pivots of its 2016 campaign, have not gone unnoticed. Its double standards, contradictions and failures at the national level have also the potential to derail the party in the state.

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