With the high-voltage poll campaign coming to an end in West Bengal, both incumbent Trinamool Congress and prime challenger BJP are competing to win the war of perception by claiming to be on course to win over 200 seats in the 294-member Assembly. While dominating the perception war is a familiar electoral strategy in India to attract the undecided voters, in Bengal’s political psychology and culture of reprisals, it is an indispensable factor for any party to inculcate a sense of confidence among their voters to step out and vote freely. This must be kept in mind while reviewing the ground scenario across the state.
Among the observations flowing from travelling across the state is a palpably stronger anti-Trinamool sentiment among Hindus across age brackets. But, at the same time, the degree to which the same voters are willing to hedge about the possibility of voting as per their true sentiments is way more than in the 2021 Assembly election.
Two, women voters—a trusted bloc whose support Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has enjoyed—are more divided in their loyalties this time, with electorally-divided households noticed in some rural areas. The pull of the ‘Mamata magnet’ also seems to have weakened among urban and working women, as they are weighing security and aspirational issues more than the women-centric state welfare schemes successfully launched.
Rural women are oscillating between the call for change being peddled by men and the need for continuing with the gamut of state welfare schemes, within which Lakshmir Bhandar is a prime anchor of sentiments. Compounding this intra-household contrast in electoral sentiment is the issue of rural distress. Though the potato harvest in the country’s second largest producer state has been good this time, the prices have been so low that many farmers had to leave the crop in the field.
The issue of young members of rural households feeling the acute pain of unemployment is another tangible issue. Yet there is a significant section of rural women who are not willing to let go of the money coming to their accounts from the government schemes. Hence, the biggest take-away from observing closely the state’s three Ms—Muslims, Matuas and mahilas—who are considered crucial factors in the electoral arena, the mahilas may be the deciding factor as they hedge their bets.
No wonder then that the BJP’s central leadership, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, has over-emphasised women’s issue by making a triad of promises—continuation of the welfare schemes with larger sums, reservation of a third of jobs for women, and improvement of their security given the fear of incidents like those at Sandeshkhali and the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital.
On the other hand, the Trinamool leadership is reaching out to women via schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar and stressing the fear factor among them that a change in government would result in the benefits coming to an end, which may have many takers in the rural areas and in the poorer households.
In contrast to these layered ground scenarios among the Hindu households, the Muslims present a nearly unified and electorally consolidated picture, barring few exceptions. In our field study, we found a continuity of the 2021 trend of Muslim consolidation behind the incumbent Trinamool in most constituencies. The sentiment is a classical outcome of electoral pragmatism and minority insecurity when the BJP has emerged as the prime challenger. This election may even see minorities backing the incumbent government even more strongly than in 2021, as politics over the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls has created a new reason to perceive Trinamool as their saviour. Other local claimants of the Muslim vote, such as the Indian Secular Front led by Nawsad Siddique, chief cleric at Furfura sharif, and Humayun Kabir, head of the Aam Janata Unnayan Party, seem substantially marginalised as spoilers for the community’s vote.
For the BJP, the challenge is to fuse the economic frustrations with the demographic fear—perceived or real—among Hindu voters. While the sentiment may be conducive for the saffron party, the issue of organisational weakness when compared to the incumbent is a real factor that may affect their endeavour.
The importance of the fear factor as a variable in Bengal’s politics seems to have diminished, as is evident from reports of the people coming out in numbers to vote enthusiastically in the first phase across groups. Yet the riddle over the women’s vote within the whole complicates any analysis.
One factor to note is the Trinamool Congress’s lead among women voters in the 2021 Assembly election and the 2024 Lok Sabha election—13 percent and 20 percent, respectively. With a possible dip in support among the urban and working women, the question that remains open is how the rural women’s votes would be split, it would be reasonable to observe a momentum away from the Trinamool base.
Even with all these evolving equations, it remains to be seen whether the BJP can cross the Rubicon this time, when a large cohort of male voters are whispering in one direction and women voters are hedging their choice. Bengal remains an enigma in which any quest for electoral certainty is a gamble.
Sajjan Kumar | Political analyst and founding director of PRACCIS
(Views are personal)