The election battle in West Bengal is moving southwards with the third phase of polling on Tuesday, when the quiet shift in political strategy of anti-BJP consolidation will unfold in full strength, threatening Narendra Modi-Amit Shah’s fantastical ambition of winning 20-35 of the state’s 42 parliamentary seats. The contest in the 36 seats where elections will be held over the next five phases will be competitive and three-cornered. Election 2024 is different: this time, the Trinamool Congress, the Congress and the CPI(M)-led Left Front are competing to defeat the BJP.
Having a common foe does not make the election easier for the contestants. It does, however, make it easier for voters to choose, because there are only two sides in the fight—against the BJP or for any of the other three. There is a ripple in West Bengal’s politics that the CPI(M) is set to make a small but significant comeback by reversing the outflow of its votes to the BJP that was evident in the 2019 Lok Sabha and the 2021 assembly elections. The big jump in BJP’s vote share to just over 40 percent in 2019, up from 17 percent in 2014, happened because there was a sharp fall in the CPI(M)’s vote share—from nearly 30 percent in 2014 to 7.5 percent in 2019, as the bulk of voters shifted right and a smaller number shifted to Trinamool.
The Congress and CPI(M) failed to win even one seat in the 2021 state assembly elections; in 2019, the CPI(M) was reduced to nil and the Congress salvaged two seats, including the party’s former Lok Sabha Leader of the Opposition Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s Baharampur constituency, which he has held from 1999, and Maldah Dakshin, a family stronghold of the legendary A B A Ghani Khan Choudhury.
The anticipation is the CPI(M) will return to centre-stage Indian politics via a change of fortune in West Bengal, starting with Murshidabad, where state secretary and politburo member Mohammad Salim is contesting against BJP’s Gauri Shankar Ghosh and Trinamool incumbent Abu Taher Khan.
The re-entry of the CPI(M) as a strong contender would be bad news for the BJP. The shift of voters from the CPI(M) to the BJP evident in 2021 and 2019, and fed its ambitions of winning big in West Bengal. It transformed West Bengal electoral politics into a bipolar contest from a three-cornered or four-cornered fight.
The perception is that CPI(M)’s voters and its workers are returning to the party fold. The perception also is that votes will be transferred from the Congress to the CPI(M) as part of the seat sharing arrangement. And then there is the political message that is being delivered by all three parties turning the 2024 election into an anti-BJP consolidation. The expectation for Murshidabad is that this will deliver a win for Mohammad Salim.
All this implies in the remaining 36 seats, voters are being nudged to decide tactically—to choose the best candidate to defeat BJP. The Trinamool, Congress and CPI(M) campaigns have changed to focus their attacks on the BJP, painting it to be anti-West Bengal. Remarkably, all three parties have identical lists covering the failures of the Modi regime and its communally divisive policies—joblessness, inequality, price rise, corruption, Mandir politics and selective sympathy for women.
The choice for voters has boiled down to one big question: will West Bengal benefit or suffer from electing a BJP representative? By reminding voters that the Centre has always discriminated against West Bengal, treated it in step-motherly fashion, as former finance minister Ashok Mitra famously said, the trio has invoked a deep-rooted distrust. The Congress, CPI(M) and Trinamool’s coordinated efforts in the 17th Lok Sabha, spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee, that the Modi regime deliberately withheld people’s money due for MGNREGA jobs and housing subsidies has stirred memories of past injustice.
The CPI(M), instead of scattering its dwindled political capital and resources, has concentrated its efforts on 10 seats, all of them in South Bengal. In some seats, like Serampore, held by Trinamool leader Kalyan Banerjee, and Jadavpur, where the ruling party’s youth icon Saayoni Ghosh is the candidate, the CPI(M) has decided that it needs to regain ground.
The strategy is to win small and regain voters in other places, especially younger voters. As party boss Salim admits, the CPI(M) lost the confidence of an overwhelming number of voters who belonged to families that had supported the party across generations. The party lost support in urban strongholds like Jadavpur, just as it lost support in rural strongholds in Hooghly and the old Burdwan district, now split in two.
Riding on the back of the opposition consolidation, the CPI(M) is working on reviving the rural base and reconnecting with urban voters. It seems to have banked its hopes on constituencies where the Trinamool appears weaker for a variety of reasons, and in the expectation that votes from the Congress will be transferred to give it an advantage in an election where there is no pro-Modi wave.
The CPI(M)’s optimism is based on a hunch that the political mood is changing and the balance that was tilted after 2014 between the Right and the Left, with the Middle holding the Centre, is likely to be restored in 2024. The revival of the Left is therefore crucial to the collective opposition’s expectation that the tide may be turning again.
Shikha Mukerjee
Senior journalist based in Kolkata
(Views are personal)
(s_mukerjee@yahoo.com)