No beating Didi this time?

People seem to believe Mamata Banerjee has delivered the change she promised, but complain of violent agents on the ground.

May 19, 2016 12:54 am | Updated September 12, 2016 08:54 pm IST

When Mamata Banerjee, the charismatic leader of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), came to power in West Bengal in 2011, she promised poriborton (change). During the 2011 election, echoing the sentiments of many others, a villager in Purba Magrahat, South 24 Parganas district, had told us, “Let me try the TMC for five years; if I don’t like what I see, I’ll switch right back to the Left Front.” At that point, the Left Front had been in power for 34 years straight, but their popularity had waned due the land acquisition debacles in Singur and Nandigram and a general ennui that goes with a party that has ruled for so long.

In the five years since, Ms. Banerjee has consolidated power and her TMC has become a dominant party in West Bengal. Fighting for their survival, former enemies Congress and Left Front formed a jot (alliance) to contest against the TMC. Yet, if the exit polls are to be believed, the alliance (of Left Front and Congress) has little chance of winning this election.

Bhanu Joshi
Neelanjan Sircar

When Ms. Banerjee had come to power, her mandate was to change the situation of West Bengal for the better. Whether things actually have or have not changed for the better is not important; what’s important is that voters believe that they are better off than before. It’s worth thinking about how Ms. Banerjee consolidated her power and demonstrated poriborton to West Bengal’s electorate.

The visibility of change The roads in West Bengal seem much better than they used to be. This isn’t just a Kolkata phenomenon; this is something we heard everywhere we went in the State. Data from the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) suggest that while West Bengal is way behind many States in terms of road infrastructure, the surfaced length of State highways in “below standard” and “standard single lane” roads, the most crucial roads connecting rural areas, increased by 15 per cent in 2013 after three stagnant years. While the data are available only until 2013, and thus severely limit any serious analysis of road improvement, this provides some prima facie evidence for road improvements during TMC’s tenure.

In our travels, we found other things credited to the TMC include distribution of cycles (complete with a unique logo) to students under the Sabooj Sathi programme, and large campuses of farmer-direct agricultural markets painted in the unmistakeable blue-and-white TMC colours. All of these developments are tangible, visible products that have mass reach and bear direct TMC branding. In the game of electoral politics, leaders can demonstrate development and change through such visible projects, and often few care how these projects are being funded. A doctor in Kolkata grumbles, “I’m still owed a lot of salary; all government officials are. I’m sure she’s using the money to pay for all the bicycles she’s giving to children.” It’s easy to be cynical about these as politically motivated sops, but the programmes do allow the state to directly interact with the rural poor. More than a few villagers complain that the Left all but abandoned them in its final years of rule.

In West Bengal, the panchayats are known to be quite strong. In a village off Krishnanagar, Nadia district, a young man declares, “Here the panchayats do all the work, not the MLA.” As he explains, the local MLA is a representative of the State government, and can put pressure on the panchayats, but the work has to be ultimately done by the panchayat. Any time we go to a village where the panchayat was won by either the Left Front or the Congress in 2014, we hear about how the TMC has aggressively lobbied to switch panchayat members over to their party. In many cases, the TMC has been successful. This panchayat strategy is central to the TMC’s ability to control development and distribution on the ground.

For this to be an effective electoral strategy — while Bengal’s development is largely a local process — credit must go to the top. Here, a charismatic leader like Ms. Banerjee is important; she acts as a focal point for the work people see around them. A Congress worker we meet in Pashchim Magrahat laments the difficulties in developing a political base against what he calls the “Mamata magic”.

The politics of fear “Everything was about the party. Even when someone died, the family was sidelined and the ‘party’ took over,” commented a man in Kolkata on how the Left controlled all aspects of life. This dalatantra or “party-ocracy”, a system of a political party controlling all state and bureaucratic actors as well as everyday aspects of life, which was central to the Left Front’s rule, has been adopted by the TMC. A man supporting the Congress-Left Front alliance in Jalangi, Murshidabad district, complains, “What can we do? They (the TMC) control the police and use them to harass us.” The truth is that the fear and violence in West Bengal is as bad as we’ve ever seen it. The model of dalatantra demands total party dominance on the ground, and the use of any means necessary to keep that dominance; we sense a growing exasperation at a situation that seems to be rapidly spiralling out of control. A middle-aged businessman tells us, “Before (under the Left Front) you only had to keep one goonda happy. Now, we must keep multiple, competing goondas happy.”

Ms. Banerjee and the TMC have shown almost a complete dominance of the West Bengal electoral scenario. In 2014, it was leading in 214 out of 294 Assembly constituencies in the State. Even if the jot had been formed, and we add the vote shares of the Congress and the Left Front in 2014, the TMC was still ahead in 179 constituencies (far above the halfway mark of 148). In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received 17 per cent of the vote, a number it is unlikely to reach this time. One might wonder how much of the BJP support in 2014 would need to transfer to the Congress-Left Front alliance for this election to become competitive. Using 2014 numbers, our calculations suggest that the Congress-Left Front alliance would have to win at least two-thirds of the voters moving away from the BJP, a highly unlikely scenario.

Based on recent history, it’s hard to see the TMC losing the election this time. Ms. Banerjee has demonstrated the poriborton she promised. However, even if the TMC wins, she would be wise to remember that violent actors on the ground are notoriously difficult to control. After all, it was an inability to do so that led to the downfall of the Left Front after 34 years.

Bhanu Joshi and Neelanjan Sircar are based at the Centre for Policy Research. Ashish Ranjan of CPR contributed to the story. The writers would like to thank the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University, Sonepat, for assistance.

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