Battleground Bengal: BJP off the block, while TMC is fire-fighting

The BJP is already off the blocks in the race to win Bengal, carpet bombing the state with old political warhorses even as the ruling Trinamool Congress is busy fire-fighting dissidents.

The other two major political parties, the CPI (M) and the Congress, too, are trailing, failing to formalise their proposed alliance, which remains elusive due to a lack of unanimity over seat sharing and on the chief ministerial face.

The Congress wants one of its leaders to lead the alliance, a proposition rejected by the CPI (M), the largest constituent of the Left Front in the state.

The two parties, however, are jointly organising political programmes in the state against both the TMC and the BJP. But many of their district leaders said the alliance would be able to perform better at the grassroots if the workers were informed well in advance the constituencies in which their respective party would put up candidates.

“If the seat-sharing deal is left pending for the eleventh hour, it will create confusion and disharmony as by then, there will be aspirants from both the parties for the same seat,” said a Congress leader from Murshidabad district.

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“There will be hardly any time left to bring workers of the two parties on the same page if the squabbling over seat-sharing breaks out at the last minute,” he said.

He pointed out that even in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections due to disagreement over seats, the alliance could not materialise, leaving the workers confused just before the polling.

As for the TMC, emissaries of party supremo Mamata Banerjee are holding peace parleys to win over the dissidents. Three rounds of talks that senior TMC MP Saugata Roy held in the past week with a sulking Suvendu Adhikari, the most popular mass leader of the party after Banerjee, did not make much headway.

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Similar peace efforts failed to make much progress with other dissidents such as state Consumer Affairs Minister Sadhan Pandey, Cooch Behar Dakshin MLA Mihir Goswami, Sitai MLA Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia among others.

In contrast, the BJP, which was until recently divided into three factions, quickly doused the fire of dissidence by taking away the organisational control from the bickering state leaders.

The party was fragmented in three groups — one comprising loyalists of state president Dilip Ghosh, another comprising new entrants to the saffron brigades loyal to Mukul Roy, while the third group was that of old guards like party’s former state president Rahul Sinha, sidelined in the current setup.

To avoid nepotism and groupism, the party appointed five central leaders with experience of handling elections to get an unbiased report on its present position in the state, which has been divided into five zones.

Sunil Deodhar has been assigned to look after Midnapore zone; north Bengal zone is being looked after by Harish Dwivedi ; Dushyant Kumar Gautam is doing the assessment in Kolkata zone whereas Vinod Taorey has been made in charge of Nabadwip zone and Vinod Sonkar of Asansol and Durgapur zone.

The team has already started their works. The party has reportedly identified around 75 constituencies mainly in North and South 24 Parganas and Kolkata region where it has a very weak organisational presence.

In other 50-plus constituencies, according to the preliminary assessment, the party organisation needs major revamping, sources said.

The quintet, being jokingly referred to as Pancha Pandavas within the party circle, will directly report to BJP national president J P Nadda and senior leader Amit Shah. The two leaders will spend separately at least two days in the state every month till the Assembly elections are over.

Accordingly, Nadda will be in the state on December 8-9, according to BJP National general secretary and Bengal observer Kailash Vijayvargiya. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah are also expected to tour the state next month, BJP sources said.

In the run-up to the elections, the BJP will depute one central in charge for each of the state’s 294 Assembly constituencies, party insiders said. From next month BJP leaders with good organisational capacities would be brought in from states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh among others as the party has set the target of winning 200 seats.

Every central in charge will head a team the party will set up for each constituency. Members of the constituency-level teams and booth-level teams will be trained by five state general secretaries (organisation) of the party’s five state units, the party sources said.

The organisational secretary post in the BJP is invariably reserved for people from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the party.

Booth-level members called panna-pramukh would be given responsibility to contact electorates enlisted in a panna, meaning page, of an electoral roll, sources added.

The BJP plans to reach out to every voter in the state before the Assembly elections through this network of ‘panna pramukh’. The state has over 70,000 polling booths.