If confirmation were necessary that violence begets violence, look no further than the West Bengal panchayat election of 2023. In the 41 days since the election was announced on June 8, the number of dead has crossed 42, and it could rise. Seventeen people were killed on polling day alone. In the days that followed, more people died. The opposition is unanimous that the panchayat election was a travesty of democratic electoral politics.
However, the violence and the death toll point to a significant change in West Bengal’s political dynamics. The competition this time around was multipolar. Contrary to the dominant narrative that the panchayat election was a binary contest between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP—the former a redoubtable regional party and the latter an equally formidable national behemoth—it turned out to be a four-way fight, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) significantly improving its vote share to 12.96%, the Congress increasing its vote share to 6.42%, and the Indian Secular Front (ISF), a Left ally, picking up just under 1% of the vote share.
The distribution of votes shows that the TMC has increased its vote share to 51.14% in rural West Bengal. In the 2021 State Assembly election, its vote share was 47.93%. Though this is a bad comparison, it has significance for other reasons. The second noteworthy change is the BJP’s vote share: in rural West Bengal, its popularity has dwindled to 22.88%, which is an over 16% drop compared with the party’s vote share in 2021, when it touched 38.1%. And BJP’s expansion in West Bengal has been primarily in the countryside and small towns.
The decline in BJP’s vote share is hugely significant, indicating a fall in its rural support base. The increase in vote shares registered by all other parties implies that the BJP’s votes have been split and redistributed between the TMC, CPI(M), Congress and ISF. If improvements in the opposition party vote share are a measure of the state of health in elected democracies, then West Bengal’s political health has improved since 2021.
This pulling away of support among rural voters will impact the BJP’s overall outcomes in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, where every seat it fails to retain makes it much tougher to match the impressive victory of Narendra Modi in 2019. It will probably increase Mamata Banerjee’s chances of certainly retaining the 22 Lok Sabha seats her party won in 2019, and it could take her close to fulfilling her desired target of winning at least 34 of 42 seats in 2024.
Since 2019, when Mamata faced the humiliating truth that her party had retained only 22 Lok Sabha seats and the BJP had zoomed to an 18-seat tally, it has been her one-point agenda to win big in 2024. By recapturing the rural bases that had gone over to the BJP, Mamata has repositioned the TMC as the party with the widest grassroots connection.
By sending out a fact-finding committee led by Ravi Shankar Prasad to visit mostly North Bengal—the war zone with the heaviest casualties—the BJP made a pre-emptive move even before the counting of ballots ended. That move drew attention to the obvious: BJP has been strangely selective about the locations where it chose to confront the TMC and the other opposition parties.
It also emphasised that the TMC had suffered the most in the violence that was peculiarly concentrated in Murshidabad, Malda, Cooch Behar, and pockets of North Dinajpur, South and North 24 Parganas. The number of BJP supporters or workers killed in the violence was the lowest. The number of dead who belonged to the ISF exceeded that of the BJP and even the CPI(M) and Congress.
BJP’s rural strongholds are not concentrated entirely in the North Bengal districts. It also picked up panchayat and parliamentary seats from the western districts of Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram, West Midnapore and West Burdwan in 2018 and 2019. The party’s 77-seat victory in the 2021 State Assembly elections—that made it the official opposition to the TMC and catapulted the vociferous Suvendu Adhikari to the top of the BJP celebrity tree—was largely from the strongholds in North Bengal as well as the western districts.
Oddly enough, the western districts were not the arenas of violence. The fight between the TMC, BJP and the Congress-CPI(M) did not break out with murderous assaults in these places. It appears that the BJP has abdicated its responsibility to represent the rural and tribal voters of economically weaker Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram, and West Midnapore. Instead, it concentrated its attention on retaining its enclaves in North Bengal. By relinquishing its interest in these districts, the BJP enabled the TMC to stage a big comeback in the just-concluded panchayat election, improving the latter’s prospects in the forthcoming 2024 elections at the cost of its arch-rival—all without engaging in a fight.
The violence that erupted at the start of the panchayat election process is a form of irreducible truth in politics and popular sovereignty, as scholars have argued in the Indian context. Violence in politics is both an overt and an underlying force. Political scientist Thomas Blom Hansen noted that “elections make the potential of violence more than ever present and constant.”
It may be too early to conclude that this panchayat election has initiated a new realignment of forces and equations in West Bengal politics. The decline in the BJP’s vote share and the increase in the vote shares of other political parties indicate changes in voter preference. This may be a transient phenomenon, or it could be a portent of the future. The 2024 elections will be another test.
Shikha Mukerjee
Senior journalist