By Tathagata Roy
At the end of long 34 years, Left Rule in West Bengal has finally ended. And the person who brought it about, almost singly, is a frail little lady called Mamata Banerjee. The people are agog, the media is bursting with compliments and businessmen are falling over one another to be photographed with her. As a Leftism-hater (not just a Left Front hater like Mamata) I am overwhelmed. I did not think I’d live to see this day. Long live the frail lady for what she has achieved.
Having said that, I have also to say that I’m far from happy. I am a BJP activist, and my party drew a blank. Why? A lot of people want to know. Even I wan to know. Hence this blog.
First let’s take a look at how badly the BJP has done. Detailed, constituency-wise results can be obtained from eciresults.nic.in, and they are not encouraging. The BJP, as is well known, has failed to get a single seat, though at different times they were leading at Madarihat, Jorasanko and Baharampur. Their vote share has also come down to four-something per cent, down from the usual 5-6%. rather a dismal picture.
However, there is a different way of looking at it, and we’ll see if that can give us a better or brighter picture of things. Take a look at the table above.
Now we know (whether our detractors believe us or not is not relevant) why we had fielded candidates practically in all 294 seats. We wanted our workers and karyakartas (functionaries) to wake up, have some work to do, and bring the name of the party to the forefront to the extent possible. We never expected to do well (forget winning or keeping our deposits) in any of these, and that is why we spent only a very modest amount, much, much less than what the Election Commission allows, on most of these constituencies. Our concentration was on some 15 seats, to which brought our central readers, did a high-pressure campaign and worked really hard. These seats are marked with an asterisk in the table. In addition to these there was a seat called Hingalgunj where we did not do too well, got below 10,000 votes.
What does all this indicate? To explain, I must first state the logic behind BJP’s fighting nearly all seats in the state. This logic I know as a BJP insider, but it is not difficult for an astute political watcher to figure all this out. There were principally four objectives, and I state our performance against each one of them:
First, we wanted to stir up whatever organization we have in every constituency. We also wanted the staunch supporters of BJP to have a candidate that they could vote for. This has, of course happened, but it was anyway bound to happen.
Secondly, we wanted the vote percentage of BJP to increase. This, unfortunately, has not happened.
Thirdly we wanted to make a mark in at least fifteen or so selected constituencies which we had zeroed in on and on which which had spent some money in campaigning and also extra effort (e.g. getting senior all-India leaders to speak there) . As the table will show, we have had good success in this objective, and have shown good results in such unlikely constituencies as Baharampur, Baishnab Nagar, Rampur Hat and a few others where we did not have much organizational strength.
Fourthly, we wanted to make an entry into the Assembly. In this we have failed again.
Now what?
All but the totally politically naive will know that the results of this election were principally a triumph against the CPI(M) and for the excellent conduct of the elections by the Election Commission. Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress were simply the vehicle for the people’s verdict against the CPI(M). This is not to belittle her achievements– no one at the present juncture could have been that vehicle — but just to place things in proper perspective. Positive votes are cast in the hope of getting something, like good administration, lower taxes, etc. Negative votes are cast in the hope ofrejecting something. Here there was no question of getting anything, because Mamata had promised (let alone showed) practically nothing concrete except the return of the 400 acres of Singur land to the unwilling farmers. Her manifesto of 64 pages contained 22 pages on the Railways which are irrelevant, and in the rest there were vague, sometimes meaningless (like creating an ‘employment bank’– what does it mean?) promises.
In particular she neither announced, nor does she have, a roadmap for solving the following burning problems of the state:
(a) Unemployment
(b) Financial Bankruptcy
(c) Reputation of being industry-unfriendly
(d) A totally anti-development and inert bureaucracy
(a), (c) and (d) are intimately connected, in the sense that in order to solve unemployment a state needs industry, and to lure industry it has to have a good reputation and a responsive bureaucracy. financial Bankruptcy is a different and altogether separate problem.
Now, Mamata drove away Tata Motors. Shorn of verbiage, that is the long and short of it. She has also repeatedly said that she will NEVER acquire land by force. In that case how will the industry wanting to be set up get land? And she will have to build Power plants, because the power shortage in West Bengal right now remains eclipsed because of lack of industries. Where will she get land for Power plants? Land for Power Plants is required to be near a perennial source of water, and that means fertile, multi-crop land. No farmer, certainly not after Singur, will readily agree to part with such land.
When faced with such hard decisions, Mamata will, almost always and instinctively err on the side of populism. And by doing that she will not be able to maintain her image.
Also, in the runup to the 2011 elections Mamata has reached the limit in pandering to Muslim sentiment, even fundamentalist sentiment (like humouring the highly obscurantist Peer of Furfura Sharif). Even before the elections Haji Nurul Islam, one of her MPs, had engineered a riot in Deganga, District North 24-Paraganas. While the bulk of Bengali Muslims and most of the Urdu-speaking Muslims in the state are peace-loving and wish to live in peace with their Hindu brethren, there is no denying that there is a militant, fundamentalist fringe among them who will try to take advantage of the situation and foment trouble. the result is bound to be polarization on religious lines.
Now, the only party that would protest against the wrongdoings of this fundamentalist fringe is the BJP, as it did at Deganga and Gobra in park Circus area of Kolkata and at Panchla, District Howrah. The other parties would never take the risk of angering their Muslim vote bank — it is only the BJP which has the courage to say that a crime is a crime, whether committed by a Hindu or a Muslim.
And in respect of the other problems, like industrialisation, the necessity of land acquisition and taking the bureaucracy by the horns, on which Mamata will never be able to take a proper decision and will thus push the state into economic uncertainty, BJP must come out with a bold, clear policy. A policy that will say brave new things, not the usual Left-populist garbage. Only thus, in my view, will BJP be able to step into the vacuum that is bound to arise as a result of Mamata’s populism.
And in any case, if the CPI(M) is finally eclipsed (it is a big ‘if‘, though), and the Congress and Trinamool remain in coalition who is going to form the principal opposition? It can only be the BJP!
If the BJP can factor in all these political eventualities into its political programme over the next one or two years and play its cards deftly, and build up its organization, its future should be bright in West Bengal.
