The predominantly middle-class neighbourhood of Tentuliya village in the backyard of sprawling Rajarhat township in North 24 Parganas district is unhappy with one man, Sadeq Ali (name changed). Mr. Ali, a reasonably well-off land owner, is equally distraught as he cannot answer many questions raised by neighbours. “The 40 boys I took along are now asking me why I made them join a non-party,” said Mr. Ali, who left the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), exactly a year ago in the presence of State president Rahul Sinha.
“When Narendra Modi came to power, we joined the BJP expecting protection from the goons of Trinamool Congress,” Mr. Ali said. The protection was necessary as TMC cadres took turns to allegedly thrash five of Mr. Ali’s eight pro-CPI(M) brothers and Mr. Ali himself went underground. “But Modi and Mamata aligned and BJP’s new recruits are slowly returning to the Left’s fold. How could they come together, when we were growing,” regrets Mr. Ali.
The Left cadres who joined the Bengal BJP throughout 2014 are asking similar questions every day. “We risked our lives to counter the TMC and then the party’s commander-in-chief [Narendra Modi] shakes hands with Mamata Banerjee on stage… has he ever thought about its impact on us?” asks Janak Mandal (name changed), one of the key aides of the former BJP president in Birbhum, Dudhkumar Mondal.
Interestingly, an RSS loyalist since 1984, Mr. Mondal has now resigned from the BJP and Mr. Janak Mandal is an outcast in his village.
The perception in West Bengal — after the much-hyped public meetings of Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi in Kolkata and Dhaka — is that the leaders have buried the hatchet after aggressively targeting each other in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. The development irritated ordinary cadres as the State BJP was sailing nicely after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP had independently won its first seat in the Assembly and many members of Ms. Banerjee’s inner circle were behind bars for alleged financial frauds, fuelling speculation of a split in the TMC.
But a year later the TMC remains undivided, even after sidelining second-in-command Mukul Roy, while in-fighting has peaked in the BJP. The party failed to capture any of the 92 civic bodies in the State in the civic polls in April, while officials and cadres blamed each other for the debacle. The key question is why the BJP lost the stranglehold on the TMC, when it had the best of opportunities? “Because the Saradha-scam pressure, in its present form, is not the Achilles heel that many in the BJP and elsewhere thought it might be,” said Kolkata-based political observer Garga Chatterjee.
