NANDIGRAM (WEST BENGAL): If this is a war of ideas, and not a mere electoral mud-wrestling match of the usual sort, then Nandigram is the epicentre. It’s a placename that has already seared itself into the pages of Indian political history. But that was a decade ago, when it was an outlier. In 2021, Nandigram offers a different picture a small, sharpfocused microcosmic picture of West Bengal politics as it’s being played right now.
The people of Nandigram are divided. Along voting lines which can be a euphemism for 'along religious lines'. They are also pulled by contrasting loyalties: their allegiance to 'Dada' and 'Didi'. The latter needs no explanation. Mamata Banerjee is Didi for not just Nandigram which votes in the second phase of a long-drawn poll process but for all of West Bengal, even India to some extent. Dada is Suvendu Adhikari, her Nandigram custodian-turned-challenger.
Suvendu may not yet have attained the eminence of a 'Dada' for the larger Bengal polity, but there's no doubting his stature here. Anything that has happened or not happened in Nandigram has his stamp on it.
That’s not counting his cutouts, popping out from amidst cropland, smiling at passing vehicles with a chutzpah that’s almost breathtaking, bordering on arrogance in a qualitative way. Suvendu and the Adhikari family have a close relation with these farmlands of Nandigram. He is credited with spearheading the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee now, that one committee not only ensured the chemical hub planned by the then Buddhadeb Bhattacharya government never materialised, it virtually led to the 'uchhed' (uprooting) of the 34-year-long Left Front government in Bengal. In that election and in the years that followed, Suvendu became the Dada, replacing the Left's Laxman Seth. It's as if he has now come to claim ownership of the very croplands he once struggled to save.
Ownership, that is, on behalf of the BJP. He's a mascot of sorts for the saffron party, making its first bid for power in the state. Suvendu, in a way, represents the very audacity of that bid he’s challenging the sitting chief minister. Suvendu embraces the BJP as much as the BJP embraces him.
His youth brigade, conspicuously decked up in saffron kurtas, rend the air with the by-now-familiar Jai Sri Ram chorus. It’s not so much a greeting as an assertive war cry. Do the commoners of Nandigram join in? 'Boudi', or Pratima Jena to give her formal name, runs a small eatery and watches such cavalcades pass by with studied indifference. "We'll vote who we need to vote for. No one is revealing anything this time. Dada has done work no doubt, but Didi is also our pride!"
As a woman, she empathises with Mamata. Will that count, or will she just press the button the rest of the family may press? She’s mum.
In Nandigram, Mamata is big, has detractors too
Not everyone is as coy as the Jenas. Nandigram Block 1 and 2 bore the brunt of the antiland acquisition movement against the LF regime, and Muslim voters are of a sizable number here. In these parts, they’ve no qualms about proclaiming 'Dada' to be a backstabber and Didi is naturally the ‘victim’ who deserves their support. Says Mallika Sardul, who finished school but is now a housewife, "Tell us, why should we not be with Didi?"
Why indeed? There's palpable anger against Trinamool, though. Deepa Mandol, a former CPI activist, now dons a saffron sari, with lotus imprints just so as to leave no room for doubt. Her family was old Communist stock, she says. Her family had to run away and take shelter in Digha when the TMC came to power. Now she and her husband, a migrant labourer in Tamil Nadu, are both with the BJP. But isn’t Suvendu the one who led the hordes that hunted them down those days? It doesn’t bother her one bit her anger is directed at the party.
"If even half the people who came to the Yogi Adityanath rally in Nandigram vote BJP, then it's over for TMC here!" she exults. The battle is obviously personal for her.
So it is for Suvendu. "He’s using the BJP to avenge the fact that TMC dared to sideline him," says Samata, who runs a mechanic shop in Reyepara. Nothing in Nandigram moved, no one dared to lift even a finger unless the Adhikaris so ordained. "It's not for nothing that the BJP picked him up," he adds.
A person who runs a health literacy programme, and did not want to be identified, explains that it's "PK (Prashant Kishor) and his I-PAC who became Suvendu’s undoing in the TMC". Not so much the nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, who’s nowhere as well known as Didi. "Through PK, who had direct contact with the CM, Mamata got a different view of things. Gradually, Suvendu found all his men replaced by others, he found that his hands were tied in his own fiefdom."
The BJP moved in and gave him a new platform and, of course, also a Hindutva image makeover. Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who's holding fort and micromanaged the Nandigram election for Suvendu, is keen to add that the BJP has understood the "culture and ethos" of Bengal, and are no outsiders to either the text or the context.
Does Nandigram agree? Will it be Bengal’s 'own daughter' Banglar meye the Royal Bengal Tigress? Or will it be the local Dada? It's all canned till May 2.