Mohua Chatterjee TNN
Kolkata: It is not without reason that Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, focused on main rival CPM, suddenly turned her guns on BJP — a non-entity in the state’s politics so far — during the second phase of campaigning. She has clearly sensed BJP’s serious ambition to emerge as a player in the state, for the first time. That BJP’s gains can only eat into the state’s non-Left votebank, is the greatest concern for Mamata.
Every constituency has an unprecedented and visible BJP presence. Whether it manages to bag votes or not, the party seems to have decided to ensure that the voters know the names of its candidates. The abundance of posters, banners, flags, wall writings are evidence that BJP has invested aggressively in the state.
The party contested all 294 seats in the 2001 polls, but cut a sorry figure. In 2006, contesting in alliance with Trinamool, BJP got just 40 seats to fight. This time, leaving five seats to local allies in North Bengal the party is working to double its 4% vote share in the state.
Seeking to make the best of the pro-change wave in Bengal, BJP decided to invest in a big way here for the first time. Party chief Nitin
Gadkari is convinced, say party insiders, that there should be no half-hearted effort like in the past, in making a dent that could come in handy in the long run.
Not surprising therefore that the party deployed its top guns — Lal Krishna Advani, Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Gadkari himself — to campaign hard in a state where it has no foothold.
There may be little gain in terms of seats this time, but the larger gameplan is to emerge as a new player in the state’s otherwise bipolar politics, where Congress still keeps its own little space, as CPM and Trinamool vie for the lion’s share of votes. BJP’s target for 2014 Lok Sabha is to ensure that Trinamool is pushed back
into the NDA.
While BJP is ideologically opposed to the communists, it realises the party’s entry into Bengal is possible only by wooing non-Left voters in the state.
BJP is playing at taking vote share up from 4% to 8%, which looks achievable this time, claims party leader Siddharth Nath Singh, who is also the co-in-charge of polls in the state, working at it since last September.
According to the leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha and the party’s dependable poll strategist, Arun Jaitley, “We are getting 5,000 to 7,000 people at rallies for the first time in Bengal. If we can take the voteshare to 8% now, we try to take it to 12% in the Lok Sabha.” With 8% vote share, BJP hopes to influence results in 25 seats and with 12%, it could make an impact in 50 seats.
With an eye at beating Congress in the LS polls, over corruption and other issues, if BJP can influence 50 assembly segments, the chances of wooing back Mamata to the NDA fold goes up, feels the party leadership.
With this plan in mind that BJP changed tack midway, to train its guns on Mamata, rather than hitting out at the Left, tie up with small parties or their factions and ensure that none of its campaigners take the hard Hindutva line as that will not work in Bengal, where voters are not communally divided. BJP is selling itself on the development plank in the state.
Source: The Times of India, 5th May 2011 P-5
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