Discrimination by the Centre against West Bengal is what even the Trinamool Congress sees in the new Narendra Modi-headed NDA government, because it has failed to give the state the respect it believes is due. Of the two members of parliament from the state inducted into the 71-member central team, neither made it as a senior. Plus, there are only two ministers in 2024, whereas in 2019 there were four.
The theme of discrimination against the state—evident in the lowering of West Bengal’s status from top priority for the BJP to a terrain of disappointment, manifest in the fact that there is no senior minister in the new Modi cabinet from the state—is just one of the many ways in which the strategy against Mamata Banerjee failed so spectacularly in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
The one idea that is deeply ingrained in the hypersensitive Bengali psyche is the belief that the Centre, as in the government in New Delhi, is biased and works actively to deprive the state of many things, including a bigger share in power and a legitimate share of the pie of benefits that ought to flow into West Bengal. The belief has nothing to do with party politics; the Centre’s injustice vis-a-vis Bengal pervades the discourse even within the BJP, where a deep cleavage is now apparent between the old timers and the new imports.
That is the way the cookie crumbled.
Pitted against a vastly more experienced warrior who was fully aware of the terrain she was fighting on and the idiosyncrasies of the population, Modi gifted the election to Mamata Banerjee by rescuing her from the effects of mounting anti-incumbency as each new corruption scandal was uncovered. The formula of a double-engine sarkar’s guarantee of development, peace and better governance as well as the protection of Hindus in danger from an expanding Muslim population—used by the Trinamool Congress as a vote bank to allegedly unleash a “vote jihad”—failed.
The Modi campaign walked into the trap that Mamata Banerjee had primed and popularised through her mammoth Brigade Parade Ground rally after the election was announced. Her slogan was simple—it was a call to the touchy Bengalis to dismiss anti-Bengal forces, “Banglar garjan, Bangla birodhider bisorjon (Bengal’s roar is the immersion of anti-Bengali forces).”
For voters, it was a confrontation between two sets of guarantees in West Bengal. There was Modi’s guarantee of identifying and evicting illegal Muslim settlers and giving citizenship to Hindu victims of Muslim persecution. In the Bongaon constituency, Santanu Thakur—who took oath as a junior minister for the second time—the Citizenship (Amendment) Act worked as a talisman. In most of the 16-18 Lok Sabha constituencies where Muslims are a sizeable and decisive section of voters, it did not.
Most Hindus reckoned they were better off with Didi. The lack of trust among women voters for Modi’s guarantees—evident in one reaction that pitted the victims of sexual violence in Sandeshkhali against the experience of “gold medallist women wrestlers”—was a widely held view. It became clear after Modi’s icon of nari shakti and the party’s candidate from Basirhat, Rekha Patra, not only lost, but lost in the Sandeshkhali segment of the Lok Sabha constituency too.
On their own, the issues that Modi selected to attack Mamata Banerjee had merit. Corruption, illegal state residents mostly from Bangladesh, Trinamool’s local strongmen and their overbearing ways have all contributed to the buildup of disappointments and grievances against the ruling party and the capacity of Mamata Banerjee to tackle these problems that many feel were allowed a free run because she did not nip them in the bud. But in the opinion of the voter, neither Modi nor the BJP were the answer to their prayers.
If there can be a formula of what would make a predominantly Hindu population that has undergone the experience of large-scale, unspeakable violence, dismemberment of their homeland through Partition an ideal group for the Hindu majoritarian politics of the BJP, then it ought to be the voters in West Bengal. The logic of numbers too points in the same direction, since Muslims comprise about 30 percent of the population, three districts are Muslim-majority, and 16-18 Lok Sabha constituencies have significant Muslim voters. The border with Bangladesh is porous and there is a lot of cross-border traffic, legal and illegal. The logic is, however, defeated by sentiment and a political consensus that regardless of how shrill the rhetoric about Muslim appeasement and fault lines, Bengalis will not allow themselves to be divided on the basis of religious identities.
The pity is local bred-in-the-bone BJP leaders in West Bengal know that the politics Hindu-Muslim division does not work with voters; the strategists who designed the Modi-versus-Mamata faceoff did not.
By ‘gifting’ Mamata Banerjee 29 parliamentary seats out of the total of the state’s 42, the new Modi-led NDA regime is already serving as a dart board for a vengeful Didi. As leader of the third largest party in opposition, she is relishing needling Modi on an almost-daily basis. Sometimes she prophesies that the new NDA government could last one day, other times she says it will last a short while. Every dart is aimed at inflicting humiliation on a target that over-ambitiously believed it could unseat her.
Shikha Mukerjee
Senior journalist based in Kolkata
(Views are personal)
(s_mukerjee@yahoo.com)