Long after the heat and dust kicked up by the unexpectedly high voter turnouts in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu settle down, the polemic over the Election Commission’s statistics will not go away. The provisional throng of about 92 percent in Bengal’s first phase of polling and 85 percent in Tamil Nadu represents a conundrum. Conventional wisdom has it that a more-than-moderate show on voting day can be bad news for the incumbents, the Trinamool Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. However, this judgement does not hold good any more.
In the TMC’s first victory in 2011, when its leader Mamata Banerjee routed the Left Front government, the turnout was 84.33 percent, 2.36 percentage points higher than in the previous election in 2006. Evidently, the electorate hankered for a change. In 2016, with a turnout of 82.66 percent, Mamata returned with more seats. And in 2021, amid the Covid pandemic and an intensely polarised battle between her party and the BJP, the turnout was 81.57 percent and she was voted back for a third term. Emboldened by its debut in Bengal in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had hoped to build on the political capital it had gained, but that did not come about in 2024.
The situation is vastly different in the ongoing polls. For the BJP, its campaign was not the mainstay of electioneering; the dominant determinants between victory and defeat were the security infrastructure, constituency-mapping to take a fresh look at the demography and, flowing from that, an extraordinary zeal to scrub and clean the electoral rolls.
The electoral roll revision, facilitated by the now-dreaded Special Intensive Revision conducted by the EC, was the first catalyst. The process, which should take several months, was compressed into two. It ended up striking off lakhs of voters’ names without giving many of them a chance to plead their case and seek redress.
The exercise was allegedly ad hoc and laid itself open to the charge of discrimination against minorities, because Muslim-heavy districts saw the maximum number of deletions and, by extension, disenfranchisement. In Tamil Nadu, too, over 73 lakh deceased or duplicate voters were knocked off the rolls, but the procedure did not raise a storm like in West Bengal.
Bengal and Tamil Nadu are considered as the last outposts in BJP’s unbridled expansionist ambition. In these elections, while the southern state didn’t grab the BJP’s time, money and resources after an initial burst of action centred on symbols and culture, Bengal became the sole target. Its focus was on the eastern state like Arjuna’s was on the eye of the bird placed atop a tree by his guru Dronacharya.
Mamata has served three consecutive terms in office, carrying a mixed bag of governance. Her breakout moment came when the Left Front government embraced a laissez-faire policy of industrialisation that perhaps Bengal badly needed and acquired rural land to farm out to industrialists from outside the state. The move gave her a winning slogan—Ma, Mati, Manush or Mother, Land and People—that was replete with rhetorical, emotive and livelihood resonances and caught the popular imagination.
While there has been no Singur-Nandigram moment for Mamata, her inability to stem the institutionalised thuggery, de rigueur in Bengal’s grassroots politics, has spawned an army of local rent-seeking party bosses who are the TMC’s foot-soldiers. Mamata continued the Left Front’s baneful practice that allegedly got worse with every successive rule.
Conversely, on the plus side, her emergence as a bulwark against the BJP (she quickly got her act together at the first sign of a robust BJP challenge in 2019) helped consolidate a formidable vote bank of Muslims, which the SIR may have eroded. The TMC’s strong presence in the rural hinterland through panchayats and the efficient Lakshmir Bhandar scheme worked in its favour and effectively acted as a countervail against the Centre’s cash schemes.
Never one to say enough, the BJP was not cowed down by its uninspiring showing after the 2019 success. Its state leader, former Mamata associate Suvendu Adhikari, operates on the tenet of taking no prisoners and seemed determined to see the TMC’s back with the unequivocal backing of Home Minister Amit Shah. But the BJP has not declared Adhikari as its chief ministerial candidate because its old guard, represented by Dilip Ghosh, Samik Bhattacharya and Rahul Sinha, can upset plans even if they cannot pilot an election. Will the absence of a single challenger impact the BJP in a political landscape overwhelmed by Mamata’s omnipresence?
BJP’s answer was apparently the use of State power against TMC. The strategy that began with the employment of SIR culminated in the unprecedented deployment of paramilitary forces that transformed an election-going state into a security garrison.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought his own touch to the campaign, which invited praise and derision. His “discovery” of the prosaic jhalmuri and his party-men’s public consumption of fish were tropes in the BJP’s campaign to connect with Bengalis in ways only it can think of.
Tamil Nadu was projected as a somewhat predictable election, with the AIADMK split multiple times and its best-known faction leader, Edappadi Palaniswami, fighting for survival with smaller allies and a token support from the BJP.
The DMK and Chief Minister M K Stalin’s hope of a comeback rests on an imponderable—film star Vijay, the debutante in the Dravidian fray who heads the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. The TVK is not an organised outfit with a second-rung leadership and cadres, but Vijay’s charisma seems to have drawn young voters in hordes. The X factor is whose votes he poached: the DMK’s or the AIADMK’s.
Had Stalin been more upfront about projecting his son, heir apparent and deputy CM Udhayanidhi Stalin, who also doubles as the DMK’s youth wing secretary, on the electoral centre-stage, he could have undermined the Vijay aura. Udhayanidhi has also done a stint in films. However, the dynasty factor that perpetuated a line of Nidhis in power might have worked against him.
Over to May 4.
Radhika Ramaseshan | Columnist and political commentator
(Views are personal)