Bengal: BJP goes for minority outreach, but has to quell murmurs within party

To increase its “foot soldiers” in Bengal ahead of next year’s panchayat elections, the BJP is trying to tap minorities, who surprisingly had fuelled the party’s initial growth in the state.

An elaborate roadmap has been prepared by the saffron party, identifying Muslim women and youth as potential recruits to dent the TMC’s stronghold among the state’s about 30 per cent Muslim electorates.

Out of 294 Assembly seats in Bengal, there are about 125 Muslim-dominated constituencies. The TMC had won about 90 of them in the 2021 elections to take its tally to 213. However, it started facing a hit in certain minority pockets following a few back-to-back incidents concerning the Muslim community.

Also read: Why TMC, Bengal BJP are fretting over citizenship for minorities in Gujarat

The party witnessed its first Muslim backlash in the recent past following the alleged killing of Anis Khan, a student leader critical of the TMC government, by a group of people dressed in police uniform in February this year.

Infighting among the TMC’s Muslim supporters, such as those witnessed in March wherein eight people were burnt alive and an influential panchayat leader bombed to death in Birbhum, exposed the chink in the party’s minority vote bank.

CPI(M) revival?

The CPI(M) earlier this year handed over its state leadership to Mohammad Salim, the first from the minority community to hold the post after Muzaffar Ahmad. The latter was the secretary of the Bengal province committee of the undivided Communist Party of India from 1940-43.

There has been a faint sign of revival in the CPI(M) following the elevation of Salim, who is expected to help the party recover some of its lost ground particularly in minority areas.

In the recent civic polls in the state, the party almost managed to equal the BJP’s vote share of 12.6 per cent.  The Left party’s vote share increased to 12.4 per cent in the civic polls from the measly 4.71 per cent it polled in the 2021 Assembly elections. The BJP had got around 38 per cent votes in the assembly polls.

Amit Shah concerned

Union Home Minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah, during his about 25-minute closed-door interactions with Bengal BJP leaders last Friday, expressed concern over the Left revival in the state, according to party insiders. He was reportedly told by the BJP state leadership that a section of the TMC’s disgruntled minority workers started drifting towards the Left, swelling its vote share.

Also read: Bengal BJP distances itself from mob violence; central leadership all praise for protest

To take advantage of the political churn among Muslims in Bengal, the BJP is looking to rope in a section of them who are “disillusioned” with the TMC. “A large section of the minorities are not happy with the TMC. They are looking for an alternative. So, we are reaching out to them, and getting a positive response,” West Bengal BJP Minority Morcha president Charles Nandi told The Federal.

To begin with, he said, the party appointed six women as head of the Morcha’s district units in Bangaon, Hooghly, Siliguri, Katwa, Malda (North) and Burdwan.

Targeting women and youth

The BJP leader claimed that Muslim women are more forthcoming towards the party because they benefited from the ban on Islamic practice of triple talaq, which presumably allowed a Muslim man to divorce his wife instantly. Moreover, he said, Muslim girls are the major beneficiaries of the scholarship the Union government provides for the minority students.

Apart from women, another target group is the Muslim youth, who Nandi said are frustrated over lack of employment opportunities in the state. The morcha’s district units have been instructed to felicitate meritorious students whenever they excel in any examination to build rapport with them and their families.

“We are also reaching out to Muslim intellectuals, madrasa teachers and religious leaders and telling them about our party’s policies and programmes for the minorities charted in accordance with our Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policy of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas,” he said.

Many firsts

For the first time, the BJP held a residential training camp for its minority leaders and workers in the state last month. The three-day training camp was held from November 17 at Berhampore in the minority-dominated Murshidabad district.

The minority morcha has also for the first time expanded its base in 41 of the 42 organisational districts the BJP has in Bengal. Only in Diamond Harbour has it failed to set up a unit. Diamond Harbour is the parliamentary constituency of the TMC second-in-command and Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee.

The BJP’s minority outreach is seen as a course correction in the state where Muslims not too long ago had started inclining towards the BJP. The switchover was witnessed in certain pockets of rural Bengal immediately after Modi became Prime Minister in 2014.

In December that year, Amit Shah, at a rally in Kolkata, handed over cheques of ₹ 50,000 each to family members of four party workers who died in political clashes with the ruling TMC. All the four were Muslims.

Anxious supporters

The spike in Muslim membership, however, had made the party’s traditional supporters anxious as they felt the trend would dilute the party’s Hindutva centric identity. An article in the July 14, 2014 edition of the Swastika, the Bengali mouthpiece of the RSS, without naming any community, described the trend as a “crisis” faced by the BJP.

“Unruly Communist Party of India (Marxist) cadres joined the All India Trinamool Congress and sidestepped the original [AITC] workers, thus creating chaos in the party…Many are now migrating to the BJP to create similar chaos,” the article read.

CAA-NRC setback

Shortly thereafter though, the trend subsided. In the aftermath of the 2019 CAA-NRC agitation, Muslims became more wary of the BJP and completely deserted the party. Nandi admitted that the CAA movement was a setback. “We had failed to properly counter the narrative that the citizenship law was anti-Muslim. The law is not against Indian Muslims,” he said.

Also read: Bengal BJP’s training workshop: Fun, games, hard talk, but rifts intact

“We need to convey to the minority community about positive secularism enshrined in our party constitution. We stand for development for all, appeasement of none,” Nandi said.

Perhaps, if the BJP really wants to regain the support  of Bengali Muslims — who had shed their blood for the party — it should convey the Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas message to its own traditional Hindu supporters.