Bengal Panchayat Polls: Stakes high for all parties but more so for Abhishek Banerjee

Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee (Image: Twitter/@abhishekaitc)

In a span of about 14 months – between January 2021 and March 2022 – four out of five key West Bengal parties changed their state unit chiefs. These new appointees obviously have corresponding line managers to answer to, a year before the national polls. For all of them the stakes are high in the three-tier panchayat polls on July 8 with 74,000 wards/seats for the taking.

A few months before the 2021 assembly elections, a minority-led party – Indian Secular Front (ISF) – led by Nawsad Siddique, scion of an influential Bengali spiritual family, was launched. The following summer, Abhishek Banerjee, nephew of Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and an MP, was promoted from the rank of youth-wing head of All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) to a decision making position as the national general secretary.

In the autumn of 2021, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) replaced its most electorally successful Bengal unit president Dilip Ghosh, amidst strong in-house resistance, with Sukanta Majumdar, a young MP from central Bengal. The disquiet in the Right echoed soon in the Left as Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) elected its first Muslim state secretary Mohammed Salim since its inception in 1964, triggering much internal debate.

For all these “newcomers” the panchayat polls are a challenge.

BJP’s Stakes

The main opposition party BJP’s challenges are severe. BJP has to assure its cadres and central command that it can retain its share of votes and seats which had moved predominantly from the Left to the Right since 2019. After the 2021 Assembly poll, an unmistakable return of the Rights’ vote to the Left has pushed BJP to the third spot in some key elections.

In the Sagardighi bypoll that Congress won in alliance with the Left, BJP was pushed from runner-up in 2021 to the third place. Sagardighi was a Left bastion till 2006. Before that, in the late-2021 Calcutta Municipal Corporation election – a decisive marker – CPI-M came second in terms of vote share pushing BJP to third place. In the 2022 municipal polls too, CPI(M) was marginally ahead of BJP in vote share.

Among many factors, one of the confusions of the voters is distinctive: Is Mamata Banerjee tacitly aligning with BJP? The confusion encourages anti-TMC voters to align with their parent Left bloc, deepening the Right’s crisis. Similar confusion in the 1990s pushed anti-Left voters to TMC as they perceived an “unethical” understanding between the Left and the then main opposition party, Congress.

Secondly, BJP is inordinately hanging on to central probes against TMC corruption. If this strategy backfires – despite several favourable court orders and routine interrogation of TMC leaders – it would hurt the BJP in the 2024 polls. Similar campaigns had backfired earlier – as Trinamool uses it to fire up hurt regional pride – and yet is being repeated before the panchayat polls. The July 11 results will indicate if the strategy worked.

Left-Congress-ISF’s Chances

In the last two years, the Left-Congress alliance have sort of steadied themselves. They claim to have a fair chance to defeat BJP in most seats, while challenging TMC. The alliance can indeed damage both BJP by extracting a share of Hindu vote and TMC by splitting the minorities. However, chances of the alliance replacing BJP as the first runners-up are slim.

Congress’s Muslims are “our brothers” assertion in Karnataka boosted its chances among minorities. The opportunity – however – will wane in Bengal if BJP manages to up its Hindutva agenda like in 2021, as extreme polarisation benefits both TMC and BJP. So the alliance's objective would be to interrupt the acute polarisation and hope that ISF’s Siddique can break the TMC-BJP binary.

A former state and national-level volleyball player, Siddique (30) maintained a calm demeanour under pressure and put up candidates in over a 1,000 seats in 10 out of 23 districts. It is not much, yet it accentuated pressure on TMC as the candidates are mostly placed in Muslims pockets. A tiny split in minority vote will spell bigger trouble for TMC as the Muslims – nearly 30 percent of Bengal’s population – have been traditionally endorsing TMC.

Since the Bengal Muslim League’s formation (1912) and eventual disappearance, Muslims never had a major party of their own in West Bengal unlike in Assam or Kerala. With the expansion of the Hindu Right, the rise of a minority party is inevitable. Siddique’s objective would be to consolidate one. It will wreck TMC and ensure BJP’s victory in future.

TMC is thus working overtime to brand Siddique as BJP’s “agent”. The ruling dispensation allegedly “obstructed” ISF candidates from filing nomination papers in critical areas, while targeting its cadres.

Abhishek Banerjee’s Challenges

TMC is clearly ahead, suggests surveys.

Such reviews often go wide of the mark, yet there is little to doubt that TMC is the only party with the ability to monitor all polling booths which – besides other advantages – provides a clear edge. But its battles are elsewhere.

Abhishek has won the succession war – important in South Asian dynastic politics – in the party's upper echelons dominated by ageing ex-Congressmen. But his key test is to rein in the typically unruly TMC cadres.

In the 2018 Panchayat poll, the cadres went out of control and targeted opposition workers randomly, which – it is believed – harmed TMC in the next Lok Sabha polls (2019). Meanwhile, TMC’s infighting for nominations has reached epic proportions this time. Abhishek’s central battles are thus within, especially when Mamata Banerjee has taken the backseat in the panchayat polls.

An incumbent party’s success largely depends on its ability to keep the opposition divided which – from the Left to Right – is converging against TMC. Abhishek’s ensuing challenge – following the panchayat polls – is to split the opposition. It would be an unquestionably difficult task as TMC is set to face a decade-and-half long anti-incumbency hereafter.

Suvojit Bagchi is a Kolkata-based journalist who previously worked with Ananda Bazar Patrika, BBC World Service and The Hindu. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.