Bhattacharyya, Dwaipayan (2023). Of Conflict and Collaboration: Mamata Banerjee and the Making of ‘Franchisee Politics’ in West Bengal, Economic and Political Review, September 9, 2023, VOL LVIII NO 36.
Political violence is a routine feature of elections in West Bengal. While poll-related violence is not unique to Bengal, in no other State is it so deadly. In Bengal, it consumed 70 lives in 2003, 30 each in 2008 and 2013, and 50 in 2018. What is it about West Bengal’s political system that demands such relentless bloodshed? This paper by Dwaipayan Bhattacharya seeks to answer this question by mapping the structures of political power in a context of evolving political competition.
The decline of the left
In Bengal, “partisan violence” — violence perpetrated in the name of a party by individuals who identify with said political party — trumps all other forms of social violence, including communal violence. In other words, it assumes an “identitarian significance in the State”. The conventional liberal view of “democratic competition treats party affiliation as voluntary, unlike one’s ascriptive ‘belonging’ to a race, caste or ethnic group.” But in Bengal, “one belongs to the party”.
Such a sense of belonging remained stable for more than three decades of the left front rule. But once it ended, many who ‘belonged’ to the left migrated to the new incumbent, the Trinamool Congress. There was more churn with the advent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), wherein a two-way traffic opened between the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, of not just party workers but also of leaders. But even in this scenario, where party loyalties seemed to have eased up somewhat, “people sacrificed their lives in the name of their parties”. Why?
Bhattacharya’s explanation begins with the nature of the left’s governmental intervention in West Bengal. The State had witnessed a series of peasant movements in the late colonial and early post-colonial decades “against the landlords in demand for land to the tiller and a just share of produce for the cultivating tenants”. This set the stage for the left front’s agrarian and land reforms at the turn of the 1980s. However, these new pro-poor laws were not easy to implement. Neither the police nor the civil administration could do it.
It was in this scenario that the left front “instituted elected panchayats at the village, block, and district levels for the first time in the country to engage the majority poor in the conduct of governmental matters.” They did it by mobilising the members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM to make use of violence or the threat of violence to implement the pro-poor laws. Local CPM leaders, most of them school teachers, acted as the rural poor’s interface with the State machinery. This helped the CPM win respect and authority and establish itself as a hegemonic force.
But after the initial burst of pro-poor reforms, the CPM eased up as it “prioritised social stability and re-election and turned itself into a managerial outfit”. With land reforms halted and agriculture in stagnation mode, the State economy suffered, sparking popular discontent. Hegemony gave way to “dominance” as the party sought to quell the “unruly” who could endanger social peace. The party thus used force to tighten its control over society and maintain status quo until a series of blunders in its attempt to obtain land for industry resulted in its rejection by the majority. According to Bhattacharya, “In its moments of triumph as well as of defeat, by placing the party at the centre of the lifeworld and livelihood of the rural folks, the CPI(M) created a form or site for popular politics that one may call ‘party society’”.
How Trinamool changed status quo
This changed, but not entirely, when the Trinamool Congress came to power. While it inherited a ‘party society’, the Trinamool lacked the left’s regimented party structure. Instead, it was organised around the charisma of a single leader, Mamata Banerjee. As a “crusader who decimated the seemingly unshakeable CPI (M) behemoth”, Banerjee became an attractive ally “for the community leaders who were but marginal leaders in the left’s party society”. More crucially, Banerjee conveyed to the local leaders that they were “allowed to freely cash in on her charisma and expand their influence in exchange for an unquestionable loyalty to her leadership, and to her alone.” By thus outsourcing “social control to community leaders and local control to grassroots bosses of the party”, Banerjee’s Trinamool “adopted a franchisee model of politics in which the brand of her party and her charisma are offered to the local party bosses for reaping benefits ranging from an electoral mandate to financial profit in legal or illegal business ventures.”
The paper contends that, over time, the ‘franchisee politics’ of ‘brand Mamata’ unleashed two conflicting trends — on the one hand, the “unimpaired accumulative practices” of the local Trinamool leaders depleted their popular legitimacy, prompting Banerjee to announce that it is she who is the candidate contesting from all the seats; on the other, no local chieftain of the Trinamool can maintain dominance without absolute control over territorial constituencies. In other words, “any challenge from within or without the party must be eliminated.”
The franchisee model, just like in the corporate world, recast territory as the space for business deals. At the same time, it objectified “people as silent voters obliged to pay back for the benefits they received from the party and the government. Any change in this arrangement is perceived as threatening, to be treated with severe violence and suppression.” Thus, the structure of violence under Trinamool’s franchisee model is different from the party violence under the CPM. While party violence could often be tempered by senior CPM leaders, the Trinamool leadership has little control over the “Frankenstein-like franchisee it has created”.
The entry of the BJP
Over the years, the transactional nature of the franchisee model corroded the party’s emotive bond with the people. This vulnerability was exploited by the BJP. Presenting itself as a powerful ideological alternative, it deployed communal messaging to decimate the Left and take over the oppositional space in Bengal’s traditionally bipolar politics. But its further expansion has run up against structural limits rooted in the nature of franchisee politics and party society.
The paper goes on to examine the ramifications of the franchisee model along four axes — populism and government, entrepreneurial party, community outreach, and polarisation limits.
Speaking of an ‘entrepreneurial party’, Bhattacharya points to a similarity between the Trinamool and the BJP in their economic governmentality. He argues that both follow a model of fusing business with politics, profit with public action, and crony capitalism with populism. But they differ in their sites of intervention. “While the BJP does so at the top, at the level of monopolistic corporate capital,” the TMC “presents cronyism for non-corporate capital at the base level of the informal economy.”
However, when capital mixes with power, “the gospel of the free market dissolves and absolute political control over a territory becomes necessary to transfer public resources into private possessions.” Thus, while the “BJP makes sure that its chosen business houses get the best bidding opportunities” as docks, airports and transport infrastructure change hands from the public to the private, the Trinamool ensures that its party franchisee owners at the ground level are able to extract low-rung resources such as sand, soil, timber, coal or run contracts for government jobs.
The paper concludes with a section elaborating on the thesis that “franchisee politics and its transactional character put a structural limit on the BJP’s ability to thrive”.
For instance, the 2019 elections showcased what seemed like a meteoric rise of the BJP in the State, as it won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats, up from just two in 2014. Its vote share crossed 40%, not far behind the Trinamool’s 43%. With further polarisation in 2019 and 2021, it looked like the BJP would win the 2021 assembly elections. But it polled only 38% votes to win 77 seats to the Trinamool’s 215 seats and 45% vote share.
What the BJP’s lethal rhetoric on nationalism, Muslim appeasement and CAA-NRC had done was to consolidate the Muslim vote around the Trinamool in a State where they constituted 30% of the total electorate. If the BJP was banking on Hindu vote consolidation through polarisation, it needed “to wrest at least 65%-70% Hindu votes to get a winning total of 42%-45% votes in a widely bipolar contest.” This is a tall order.
Secondly, in West Bengal, “no political party gained political respectability unless it succeeded in enlisting the approval of Bengal’s home-grown intelligentsia. Even Banerjee rode to power as the left-leaning intelligentsia protested the left front atrocities in Nandigram. However, “the BJP with its deep-seated anti-intellectualism has failed to get any leverage in the State’s literary or cultural field.”
The third factor limiting BJP’s expansion in the State is that it “cannot thrive without building a narrative of ‘Hindu in danger’ by orchestrating Hindu-Muslim clashes”. The spread of the Muslim population across the State and its “primarily rural habitat” makes both Hindus and Muslims physically contiguous communities. “Such proximate cohabitation” makes it impossible to “localise violence and works as an existential deterrence for extensive communal riots.”
Finally, perhaps the single biggest factor undermining the BJP’s initiative is the very nature of a party society, where affiliation to a party generates a stronger sense of belonging than one’s identification with any social or religious group.
