Mamata-led Trinamool trounces BJP, may win over 200 seats

By giving a landslide lead to the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress on Sunday (May 2), Bengal maintained its two facets — one political and the other, cultural.

For over five decades now, the state has been giving overwhelming mandate in assembly elections to whichever party it resolves to back.

Ahead of Sunday’s results, it was speculated that the convention would change this time. Even the exit polls had predicted a neck-and-neck contest between the ruling TMC and its principal opponent, the BJP.

Proving all pundits and pollsters wrong, until 2 am, with counting still on, the TMC had victories and leads in 213 seats, two more than its tally in 2016.

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Counting was held for 292 seats. Elections in two seats were countermanded due to the death of candidates who succumbed to COVID-19.

The BJP’s tally is restricted to two digits. At the time of filing this report, the BJP is ahead in one seat while it bagged 76 others taking its total tally to 77, certainly a disappointment for the party that was eyeing more than 200 seats.

Remarkably, the TMC has so far polled over 47.90 per cent of the votes, its highest ever aggregation. The earlier highest was 45 per cent in 2016. The BJP’s vote share dropped to 38.1 per cent from over 40 per cent it had recorded in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. In 2016, the saffron party had managed only 10.16 per cent votes to win three seats.

The poll percentage clearly showed all communities, cutting across religious, linguistic and caste divides, voted for the TMC junking charges of corruption, misuse of Amphan relief funds, deterioration of law and order and allegations of minority appeasement.

“It is a vote for the state’s inclusive culture. People have rejected the BJP’s divisive polarisation politics,” said TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee.

The TMC not only swept minority-dominated constituencies but also recovered lost ground in constituencies with large concentration of tribals and Scheduled Castes. Even in the Hindi belts of Howrah, Hooghly and 24 Parganas, the TMC has done reasonably well.

The TMC bagged 26 of the 40 seats in the tribal-dominated Jangalmahal areas. The BJP had won in 30 of these assembly segments in the parliamentary elections two years ago. Much to the BJP’s dismay, the tribals have now started resisting its Hindutva push, demanding that their indigenous religion Sarna Dharma be recognised.

The BJP’s dilly-dallying over the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, seems to have shifted the allegiance of a section of the Matua SC community that had completely backed it in the last parliamentary elections.

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Another factor that worked against the BJP is the way it projected even non-performing BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh as alternative models for Bengal.

UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in elections rallies went to the extent of claiming that Bengal would be transformed into a UP-like state if the BJP was voted to power. He suggested that anti-Romeo squads would be formed and “love zihad” would be stopped once a BJP government took over the rein of the state.

The people rejected the idea.

The BJP’s strategy of not projecting any chief ministerial face against Mamata Banerjee in a bid to turn the electoral battle into Mamata versus Modi contest also seems to have backfired.

A dwindling national economy, growing unemployment, drastic drop in the interest rates offered by banks on all kinds of deposits, and price rise did not make Modi a very attractive brand, particularly for the electorates of Bengal.

“Many women voters, in particular, voted against the BJP with vengeance for upsetting their household budget,” said Shyamali Bose, a housewife and a voter of Behela East assembly constituency.

Moreover, by randomly poaching the TMC’s leaders — many of them discredited — the BJP only scored self goals, acknowledged a leader of the BJP Mahila Morcha.

“By giving tickets to TMC legislators who were sidelined in their party for non-performance, we only spoiled our prospect,” she added.

The significance of her assessment can be gauged from the fact that about 20 per cent of the 148 TMC deserters who contested on a BJP ticket failed to make the cut.

Rajib Banerjee from Domjur, Baishali Dalmiya from Bali, Rabindranath Bhattacharjee from Singur, Sabyasachi Dutta from Bidhannagar, Shilbhadra Datta from Khardah, Rudranil Ghosh from Bhabanipur, and Jitendra Tiwari from Pandabeswar were among the prominent trounced turncoats.

“We need to assess the performance of those who got the BJP nomination after switching over from the TMC. It is quite possible that the people did not like the changeover,” said BJP state president Dilip Ghosh.

The noticeable exception is Suvendu Adhikari, who won a cliff-hanger in Nandigram against chief minister Mamata Banerjee amidst high drama and confusion.

At one point, Banerjee was declared the winner by a slender margin of 1,200 votes by news agency ANI. The Election Commission, however, claimed that it had not announced the result.

Later, the Commission officially declared Adhikari winner by a margin of 1,736 votes. The TMC, however, challenged the verdict.

“Nandigram was a sacrifice needed for a larger victory. We have won the state….. But I have heard there were some malpractices,” she said declaring that she would move the court.

Only in the northern part of Bengal did the BJP maintain the dominance it enjoyed in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when it had taken lead in 121 assembly segments of the state, catapulting the party as a major challenger to the TMC.

The TMC did better than its Lok Sabha performance in north Bengal also, hurting the BJP’s tally.

“We will surely introspect. There is no denying that people have given the mandate in favour of Mamata ji. Maybe her leg injury evoked emotion in her favour or maybe, it is the issue of native versus outsiders that ultimately became the deciding factor,” said BJP’s state in-charge Kailash Vijayvargiya.

Nonetheless, it is a remarkable improvement from just three seats the saffron party had won in the last assembly elections. It has totally occupied the opposition space, thanks to the complete decimation of the Left Front and the Congress.

Significantly, as per the lead available, the Left Front is all set to draw a blank. Apparently ‘No Vote to BJP campaign’ by the left-leaning intellectuals and youth, who had been insisting that the priority should be to prevent the BJP from coming to power, resonated with the Left supporters.

Even the CPI-M stronghold of Jadavpur voted in favour of the TMC to keep the BJP at bay.

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Another important takeaway from the result is the rejection of turncoats by the voters. Less than 20 per cent of the 148 TMC deserters, who contested on the BJP ticket are trailing. The prominent among them are Suvendu Adhikari from Nandigram, Rajib Banerjee from Domjur, Baishali Dalmiya from Bali, Rabindranath Bhattacharjee from Singur, Sabyasachi Dutta from Bidhannagar and Shilbhadra Datta from Khardah among others.

Senior CPI(M) leader Tanmoy Bhattacharya said the party’s decision to join hands with the India Secular Front (ISF) of the Islamic cleric Abbas Siddiqui might have not gone well with the party’s secular supporters.

Tactical voting by Muslims in favour of the TMC completely eroded the Congress’s support base in a few minority-dominated pockets in Murshidabad and Malda districts. The TMC swept the two districts to register its best-ever performance.