Violence begets violence, and then it becomes a monstrous cycle of viciousness. Embedded in the roots of rural power equations, the murderous conflicts of the West Bengal panchayat elections in 2023 which have claimed 13 victims so far reflect the tensions and frictions that overshadow daily transactions.
Identities in West Bengal are manifest in political terms; therefore, households and individuals are marked as much by their political allegiance as their other identities. Expecting political parties, riven by competitive factions and intense rivalries over turf and domination of these territorial parcels, to take control and curb the worst of the violence is probably unrealistic. The same is true of the administration, which, over the years, has been weakened from neutrality into an increasingly partisan bureaucracy and police force.
The edginess in 2023 that underlies the eruptions of bloody violence, in which 13 people have already died, differs from the tensions of 2018 when 27 people died, and 2013 when about 30 people died in murderous encounters between rival political groups. The continuing violence in this election is an indication of an unstable political equilibrium within the dominant Trinamool Congress (TMC) on the one hand and between the ruling party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and its Left allies, who are showing signs of revival and a willingness to fight that is new.
The challenger for the TMC in this election is not so much the BJP even though it is the official opposition in the West Bengal State Assembly with 70 lawmakers. The ruling party this time faces multiple challengers, of which the CPI(M) is the most important. The Indian Secular Front in a tiny but very turbulent pocket of Bhangar in North 24 Parganas is another. The Congress fight against the TMC is confined to well-known geographies like Murshidabad, Malda and Hooghly.
The fissures and factions within the TMC had surfaced for a variety of reasons, making it a far more volatile party than it was in 2021 when it faced its biggest challenge from the BJP and succeeded with a spectacular victory. Two years ago, the TMC seemed to have sorted out the intense rivalries between locally powerful leaders who worked at cross purposes. This year, the party in several districts is back to being a house divided, with local leaders and their henchmen fighting among themselves.
The revelations of the involvement of high-level TMC leaders, their associates and families in large-scale corruption in the under-investigation money-for-jobs scandal and the cow-coal smuggling scandal have impacted the party’s credibility. To counter the visual impact of the magnitude of corruption, the party organised an internal exercise, much like the US Primaries, for the selection of panchayat candidates. The goal was to exclude the unpopular and presumably corrupt and assemble a list of clean and locally popular candidates. Senior party leaders admit this has exacerbated the violence instead of containing it.
To top it, this year’s administrative management of the panchayat elections seems even messier than in 2018, when the TMC won nearly 34% of the panchayat seats without a contest. Compared with 2013, when central security forces were deployed by State Election Commissioner Meera Pandey to ensure free and fair elections, the route for bringing in 822 companies of central security forces in 2023 has been torturous. Instead of asking the Ministry of Home Affairs directly, the newly appointed State Election Commissioner Rajiva Sinha was ordered to do so by the Calcutta HC, following appeals from Congress and the BJP.
Continuing violence and the perception that the state and its Election Commissioner are failing to bring the bloody confrontations and murderous attacks under control have been strengthened by the strange strategy of Sinha, who procrastinated identifying “sensitive areas” and listing the booths where surveillance needs strengthening. The TMC has invited criticism for challenging the High Court’s order to deploy central forces by going to the Supreme Court, where it lost the appeal.
Instead of trashing the presence of central security forces, which Mamata Banerjee did in Cooch Behar last week, accusing them of intimidating voters and telling them not to vote, it would have been politically wiser to deal with the deployment as an add-on to the existing policing arrangements for the one-day panchayat elections. By reacting aggressively, the TMC boss has stoked suspicion that she is uncomfortable with their presence, which the opposition and political pundits think is necessary.
To argue that the state’s police and forces borrowed from other states are adequate for providing security in a one-day election is almost childish. There are 61,636 polling booths that have to be manned for the one-day panchayat election on July 8, in which voters will choose over 73,000 panchayat representatives.
Hard as it may be for a state administration under intense pressure and divided in its assessment of the magnitude of violence and the best strategy to end the killings and control the initial violence, the imperative to do so is obvious. Politically, Mamata Banerjee cannot afford to be seen to win the 2023 panchayat election by wading through a river of blood.
Win this election; she must. The panchayats, with over 73,000 representatives, are the grassroots that attach the TMC to voters. With the 2024 Lok Sabha elections coming up, where the TMC has already staked its position as a major anti-BJP force, Mamata Banerjee needs to win the panchayat elections in a way that increases her goodwill among voters and her credibility as a leader. Her change of tactics, evident in her crisscrossing the state to hold meetings, strongly indicates that she is not sanguine about the popular vote. The violence indicates that the Trinamool Congress is fighting this panchayat election under pressure.
Shikha Mukerjee
Senior journalist
(s_mukherjee@yahoo.com)