Forced to demonstrate that the rules of the Citizenship Amendment Act are indeed workable, Shantanu Thakur from the Matua community, a junior minister in the Narendra Modi regime, has declared his intent of applying for citizenship under the new rules. His impetuous declaration proves that even the strongest advocates of citizenship applications under the new rules understand there are flaws in the process.
As a minister in the union government, why Thakur has to apply to be a citizen is a question that is raising a laugh in West Bengal. His move does reveal the issue for thousands of Matua community members in the state who, even without the citizenship application confirming their status, are employed as government servants, defence personnel and in the para military services. Those not employed in government services and living in India are citizens, just as Thakur is.
For Mamata Banerjee, Thakur’s confession is a bonus to the gift the Modi regime gave her by notifying the CAA rules. Having declared that people who came across from Bangladesh in 1971 were citizens with equal rights and that there would be no detention camps in West Bengal, the confusion within the Matua community over CAA is confirmation that Banerjee has been right all along and the Modi regime was intent on dividing the population by sowing doubts about the identity of settlers from across the border.
The BJP’s hopes of sucking up Hindu votes along the Bangladesh border by raising the bogey of citizenship may not yield the advantage it calculated would flow from the notification. The loss of opportunity in its failure to stoke the fire of communal polarisation will affect at least half a dozen Lok Sabha constituencies where the party could have expected to do well following the CAA “masterstroke” (sic).
Fast-paced events have changed the political priority of an issue like Sandeshkhali, the remote Sundarban island where a strongman currently with the Trinamool Congress is being held in CBI custody. From capturing the attention of the public nationally, it has sunk to a point where it serves as a filler for both Modi campaigning in West Bengal as well as Banerjee staging a ramp walk to introduce Trinamool’s 42 election candidates at Kolkata’s iconic Brigade Parade Ground.
Sandeshkhali, it now appears, was a blip on the screen that is rapidly fading as the political competitors engage in a bigger battle to capture or retain the hearts and minds of voters across West Bengal. The change is certainly a small relief for Banerjee politically, as she settles down to defend her turf, counter the accusation of being anti-women and anti-people, and challenge the BJP on its performance as a party for the poor.
The race to capture the public imagination is a competition between the BJP on the one hand and the Congress, regional and smaller parties on the other. The fight is in large part over the fulfillment of the guarantees the Modi regime offered in 2019 and the next round of guarantees he has offered across the country. In West Bengal, the guarantees of the Mamata government to deliver immediate relief and cash transfers to women, school-going students, unemployed young men and women, the sick and the old are part of the safety net she has put in place to mitigate the impact of poverty and access to opportunities.
The guarantee-versus-guarantee fight, between the credibility of guarantor Modi versus other guarantor Banerjee, is a pattern repeated in states where regional parties are in power. It can be argued that this is competitive populism. It can also be argued that regional parties in power like the Trinamool are compelled to find ways of covering the deficits in terms of services and entitlements left behind by the Centre’s policies and welfare programmes.
In recent public rallies, it was inevitable that Banerjee focused on how the Modi government had penalised the poor in West Bengal by withholding, for two years, outstanding payments to 23 lakh people under the national rural employment scheme and release of payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. It was just as predictable that Modi would attack the West Bengal regime for blocking the flow of benefits under the Ujjwala and Ayushman Bharat schemes, and obstructing the development of the state.
There is no doubt that West Bengal is for Modi, as it is for Banerjee, an important theatre of the war for votes in 2024. Quite apart from the obvious opportunity the state offers for the BJP as it scrambles to find almost 70 seats that it must add to fulfill Modi’s target of a 370-seat haul, there is also the pain and the humiliation it suffered in 2021 when it made a no-holds-barred pitch to capture the state and install a BJP government.
This much was obvious from Modi’s speech in Siliguri, where he declared winning big in West Bengal in the Lok Sabha would be a stepping stone to winning the state in 2026. To get to 2026, the BJP and Modi need to engage with voters across West Bengal and link them to the larger arena of politics across the country, where the idea of double-engine sarkars and vikas have succeeded in various states.
The incompetence of the national political leadership in stitching together a narrative that can include the issues of land grab and the nexus between politics, administration and crime unveiled by the incidents in Sandeshkhali and the snags in unrolling benefits under national schemes is one reason why a plan like ‘one nation, one election’ seems a bad alternative to a flawed system of multiple elections at different times. The diversity of challenges and the difference in the scales on which solutions need to be found defy the logic of one election.
Shikha Mukerjee | Senior Journalist
(Views are personal)