A recently concluded study following two months of fieldwork in all the 294 Assembly constituencies of West Bengal revealed one interesting feature about the psychology of the electorate. When asked about their electoral choice and the expected outcome, a few spoke out aloud, while the majority either remained silent or whispered what they thought. People speak out when they are pro-incumbent; they are silent when they have made up their mind to vote for change. In a follow-up question, those wanting “ paribartan (change)” came out overwhelmingly as ex-Communist Party of India (Marxist) and former Trinamool Congress (TMC) supporters. In fact, a majority of the old Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters on the ground seemed wary and bitter about the saffron party being taken over by the Left and Trinamool elements, allegedly for ulterior motives.
Party to personality
The answer to this conundrum lies in the specificity of West Bengal politics. As West Bengal is a “party society”, as Professor Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya calls it, partisanship has remained a political fact even under TMC’s decadal rule, albeit with a difference. While the majority of the Left leaders at the Panchayat level hailed primarily from the teaching community, under the TMC, those who have got prominence are local contractors, businessmen and domineering personalities. They have used the party society mechanism for personal aggrandisement, thereby attempting to change the State’s political culture from being party-driven to personality-centric.
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This helps explain why most of the ongoing political analysis today on Bengal is an assessment of the impact of personalities like the TMC’s Suvendu Adhikari in Jangalmahal and Purba Medinipur, the BJP’s Mukul Roy, Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s Bimal Gurung in Darjeeling, the Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury in Baharampur and Asaduddin Owaisi and Abbas Siddiqui among the Muslims. This also accounts for TMC’s constant attempt to force the organisationally weak BJP to declare a chief ministerial face, thereby making the contest as one between Mamata Banerjee and a regional BJP face. By subtly circumventing the leadership question, the BJP is pushing the election into the rhetorical arena of Narendra Modi versus Mamata Banerjee to acquire the decisive edge. In short, while the hold of the party society is still there, the space for individual personalities is becoming prominent. This is a change of degree if not of kind in West Bengal.
This shift from party to personality also signifies disillusionment among the majority of the electorate with the existing political parties. The electoral choices are negative — people want to oust the incumbent rather than reward the new. The alternative is not a positive choice, but rather a default beneficiary. And it is the TMC which is solely responsible for this tectonic shift in the political common sense of the State wherein a majority seem disgruntled with both the institutions of the state and the existing political parties. Three factors account for this state of affairs.
Reign of terror, and corruption
First, across the State, the marker of the beginning of a systematic anti-TMC sentiment was the 2018 panchayat election. From CPI(M) office-bearers to the common people, everyone narrated how candidates of the Opposition parties were not allowed to vote. An overwhelming majority cited horrifying incidents of physical assault and filing of false police cases against the ones who resisted. Even, Basudeb Acharia, the nine-time MP (Lok Sabha) from Bankura, was not spared when he tried to get his party candidate to file the nomination. The police were reported as acting like they were an extension of the ruling party. Thus, there is a fear psychosis among the opponents, and this has been particularly intense since 2018. This has resulted in a majority, including the Left, to want the election, down to the booth level, to be under the strict supervision of Central paramilitary forces, with no role for the State police.
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Another factor which fared quite strongly in responses accounting for a mammoth undercurrent against the TMC is the intensification and monopolisation of corruption. Responding in a comparative sense, people narrated how during the Left rule, corruption was dispersed and even the common man used to get a part of the pie. Under the TMC, the majority of local leaders are contractors, businessmen and other dominant sections. So, corruption, as per the ground narrative, meant not only plundering the state resources meant for the public but also depriving the common man from having a share of the same.
In the past, under the framework of party society, being affiliated to the ruling party also meant a source of income for a majority of the people in Bengal, especially for the subaltern section in the villages. Under the TMC, the local party leaders have the monopoly, thereby giving a decisive blow to the partisan bonding along party lines. For instance, in the Haroa Assembly constituency, there is reportedly about 55,000 bighas of wasteland which businessmen take for fish cultivation by paying an annual sum of around ₹12,000-₹15,000 per bigha to the local office of the local party rather than the government. Earlier, every family used to get ₹1,000 annually from the money received. As per the report, under the TMC, the local leaders themselves started cultivating the fish, thereby depriving the party of the sum. By extension, the money being given to the people in the area also stopped. A majority of the respondents who complained of this shift happened to be Poundra Khatri Dalits and poor Muslims.
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The recent cases of corruption were reported most intensely in areas considered to be strongholds of the TMC where the party held its ground even in the 2019 general election, namely, North 24 Parganas, Kolkata, Howrah, part of Hooghly, South 24 Parganas and East Medinipur in the aftermath of the destruction by Cyclone Amphan. Respondents said that the relief fund was plundered by the local leadership so much that they have started calling it “ Amphan durniti (Amphan corruption)”.
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Subaltern interface with BJP
Finally, the emerging perception that the incumbent is employing the instrument of fear and intensifying everyday corruption has created a scenario of ‘ruling party versus the rest’ in a majority of the villages. It is primarily the Dalits and Scheduled Tribes, accounting for about 30% of the State population, who are at the receiving end. They feel abandoned and hounded by the self-aggrandising local TMC leadership. The CPI(M) and Congress don’t enthuse them, particularly the subaltern youths, due to their dilapidated organisational state and ageing profile of the leadership. Thus, they see the Modi factor as an alternative, even in the countryside. They have minimalist material expectations which in combination with an embryonic charm for Hindutva has created a conducive ambience for the BJP. The saffron party seems to be the default beneficiary in the coming election.
Sajjan Kumar is a political analyst and is associated with Peoples Pulse (@PulsePeoples) and IGPP, Delhi
