Amit Shah’s claim of winning 22 seats from West Bengal is outlandish

BJP president Amit Shah has claimed the BJP will win 22 out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from West Bengal. One understands that the BJP is desperately hinging on the east and the northeast to compensate for its losses in the Hindi heartland. It is widely estimated that the BJP will lose at least 90 seats it won in 2014 from the heartland and that its numbers in the west (read Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa) are also going to come down. Thus, the party straightaway stands to lose about 100 seats it had won in 2014 when the Modi wave, fanned by the India Against Corruption winds, had swept the country. This will bring the BJP’s tally in 2019 well under 200.

But even this kind of desperate situation does not merit the president of a national party to make such outlandish claims, specially after his claims of capturing more than 150 seats in Gujarat and forming the governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have bitten the dust in recent memory.

At the height of the Modi wave and in an alliance with Gorkha Janamukti Morcha, which is no longer a possibility, the BJP had won 2 seats in West Bengal, namely Asansol and Darjeeling. It is true that vote share of the BJP in West Bengal improved a lot in the 2014 elections jumping almost 11 per cent points to 16.8 per cent. But in the Assembly elections of 2016, the BJP’s vote share fell to 10.2 per cent.

Correspondingly, the ruling All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) increased its vote share by 8 per cent to poll 39 per cent of the votes in the 2014 general elections while in the 2016 Assembly elections, its vote share stood at almost 45 per cent, thus further shooting up.

Even the Indian National Congress increased its vote share from 9.58 per cent in 2014 Lok Sabha polls to 12.3 per cent in the 2016 Assembly polls.

This is why the BJP has been playing a polarisation game in West Bengal which it has sought to achieve via the planned rath yatra where three modified buses would have started from three corners of the state covering all Lok Sabha constituencies. The West Bengal government, acting on state Intelligence reports, has refused permission for the same, knowing that the BJP was looking to whip up communal sentiments, specially in the areas bordering Bangladesh and along the state boundaries with Bihar and Jharkhand where the party could bring in cadres from the adjoining states to foment trouble. This has forced the BJP to knock on the doors of the court.

The BJP is aware that to reap electoral dividends in the 2019 polls from Bengal, polarisation remains the only way. The Modi government’s tall talks and little delivery, and its disastrous handling of the economy cut little ice with Bengal’s electorate. Also, a troubling sign for the BJP, of late, has been defection from its file, reports of which have been surfacing for quite some time.

The reality is that following the Trinamool Congress coming to power in West Bengal in 2011 and with the Modi wave of 2013-14, a large number of former CPI(M) cadres had crossed over to the BJP to escape the retributive violence of the Trinamool Congress. However, a number of them are doing ghar wapsi now.

With the party losing power in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the morale of its rank and file has been dealt a body blow in West Bengal. The reality is that BJP had won the Asansol seat in the 2014 LS polls due to infighting within the Trinamool Congress and credit for its Darjeeling win goes to the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha who are now dead against the party. The situation is such that the sitting MP from the hill constituency has not been able to visit his constituency for more than a year now and Dilip Ghosh, the party’s state president, on his last visit, had to run away to escape the ire of the locals.

The BJP is likely to lose both Asansol and Darjeeling this time. But the defection of some former Left Front leaders in the Terai region may see the BJP pick up Alipurduar. They also stand a fair chance in Jalpaiguri and Purulia where their polarisation drive and whatsapp propaganda seem to have made a dent. But, even with these, their number is likely to be in lower single digit and a far cry from the 22 Amit Shah has announced.

Even with a superlative performance for the party in Assam and Odisha, and that of its NDA allies in the northeast, it would be difficult for the BJP to counterbalance the losses in the Hindi heartland with gains in the east and the northeast.