Trinamool’s Latest Success In Civic Polls Indicates That BJP Is Likely To Draw A Blank In Bengal In 2024

Another spectacular electoral sweep by the Trinamool in Bengal--it won 102 of the 108 municipalities whose poll results were announced Wednesday--comes as no surprise. But it holds out a grim message for the BJP: that the saffron party is not likely to win even a single seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Not only has the Trinamool stormed the BJP’s remaining bastions in Bengal, what ought to be more worrying for the BJP is that the Left has started staging a comeback in the state. With no signs of any course correction by the BJP after its continuing losses in elections since last year, it can be safely predicted that the party will find it very tough, if not impossible, to retain any of the 18 seats it won in Bengal in 2019.

The BJP, a party in complete disarray in Bengal, is also in a state of denial. That is apparent from the state leadership’s dismissal of its miserable performance in the latest civic polls: it described the polls as a “farce” since, as state president Sukanta Majumdar alleged, it was widely rigged.

The Trinamool won 1870 of the 2181 wards in 109 municipalities where polling was held on February 27. The BJP bagged a mere 63 wards, the Left got 55 wards and the Congress 59 wards. But while the Trinamool polled 63 percent of the votes, the Left’s vote share was 13.5 percent, marginally higher than the BJP’s 13.4 percent vote share. The Congress trailed with a mere five percent vote share.

What’s more, as many as 119 Independent candidates, most of them Trinamool rebels, won the polls. These Independent candidates hold the key to the formation of the boards in four municipalities--Beldanga, Champadani, Egra and Jhalda. They are sure to return to their parent party now and the Trinamool will thus be able to form the boards in these four civic bodies also.

Thus, the Trinamool will rule over 106 of Bengal’s 108 municipalities with the Left ruling over one (Taherpur in Nadia district) and elections to the Howrah Municipal Corporation yet to be held due to some pending legal issues. But Howrah is a Trinamool stronghold and once elections are eventually held there, a Trinamool sweep is a foregone conclusion.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP garnered a vote share of 40.64 per cent (the Trinamool’s share was 43.69 percent) while the Left got only 6.34 per cent of votes and the Congress 5.67 per cent.

From that high point, the BJP’s electoral performance in Bengal started slipping and in the 2021 Assembly polls, the party failed to unseat the Trinamool from power--it had loudly proclaimed that it would--and saw its vote share decline to 38.13 per cent. The Left’s vote share in last year’s Assembly polls was 5.67 per cent and the Congress got 2.93 per cent of votes.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections in December last year provided a firm indication of the saffron party’s downward spiral in Bengal. While the Trinamool swept the polls by bagging 134 of the KMC’s 144 wards, the BJP won three seats and the Left and Congress two each.

The BJP’s vote share in the KMC polls was 9.21 per cent, a significant drop of 6.76 per cent from the 15.97 per cent vote share it bagged in 2015. That year, the BJP had won seven seats and had put up a tough fight to the Trinamool in as many as 60 other wards.

Last month, the Trinamool registered landslide wins in the elections to municipal corporations in Bidhan Nagar (Salt Lake), Chandannagar, Asansol and Siliguri. In all these civic bodies, the BJP’s performance was much poorer as compared to the 2021 Assembly polls.

The BJP lagged much behind the Left in two (Bidhan Nagar and Chandannagar) of those four municipal corporations.

What would be galling for the BJP in this latest defeat is that it got trounced by the Trinamool in even the strongholds of its senior leaders: Contai, Balurghat, Kharagpur and Barrackpore.

Contai has been the stronghold of the Adhikari family, which shifted allegiance from the Trinamool to the BJP in late 2020. Sisir Adhikari and his son Soumendu have held the post of chairman of Contai municipality for over three decades. This time, the Trinamool bagged 17 wards while the BJP came a poor second by winning in only three wards.

This loss is also a humiliation for BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, who had managed to defeat Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee in last year’s Assembly polls from Nandigram. The Trinamool’s victory in Contai indicates that the Adhikari family’s hold over their fief has become shaky.

The Trinamool also won all seven municipalities in Barrackpore, considered to be the stronghold of another Trinamool-turned-BJP leader and bahubali (strongman) Arjun Singh. The Trinamool bagged the Barrackpore, Bhatpara, Naihati, Halishahar, Garulia, Kanchrapara and Titagarh municipalities. Arjun Singh is the BJP Lok Sabha MP from Barrackpore.

Kharagpur, another BJP stronghold and the turf of the saffron party’s national vice president Dilip Ghosh (who was the party state president till last year-end), has also been reclaimed by the Trinamool. Ghosh won the Kharagpur Assembly seat in 2016, but vacated it after getting elected to the Lok Sabha from Medinipur (the Lok Sabha constituency encompasses Kharagpur Assembly seat).

In the bypolls that followed, the Trinamool bagged the Kharagpur Assembly seat. But in the Assembly polls last year, BJP’s Hiran Chatterjee (a popular movie actor) won back the seat. Thus, the Trinamool’s win in 26 of the 35 wards of Kharagpur Municipality came as a huge embarrassment for the BJP.

BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar, who is the party MP from Balurghat Lok Sabha seat, has also lost face. The Trinamool swept the elections to the Balurghat and Gangarampur municipalities that fall within his parliamentary constituency.

The Trinamool won in all municipalities of North Bengal except Darjeeling where the newly formed ‘Hamro Party’ won a majority. The Trinamool bagged the Dinhata municipality that falls within Coochbehar Lok Sabha that was won by Nishit Pramanik, the current minister of state for home affairs in the Narendra Modi government.

Pramanik, who had switched over to the BJP from the Trinamool before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, is considered to be a BJP strongman. But he faced defeat at the hands of his Trinamool adversary Udayan Guha when he contested the Assembly polls from Dinhata last year.

Another BJP leader who faced humiliation this time is the national vice president of the saffron party’s Mahila Morcha, Malati Rava Roy. She won the Tufanganj Assembly seat (in North Bengal) last year, but the Trinamool won in all 12 wards of Tufanganj municipality this time.

Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs, John Barla, has also suffered a setback. He is the Alipurduar Lok Sabha MP, but the Trinamool won both the municipal bodies--Alipurduar and Falakata--that fall within his Lok Sabha seat. The Trinamool won all 18 wards of Falakata municipality.

The BJP won one of the two Lok Sabha seats from Nadia district in 2019 and nine of the district’s 17 Assembly seats in 2021. But of the ten municipalities in the district, the TMC won overwhelmingly in nine and the Left won one.

The Trinamool performed well in the Matua belt where the BJP suffered huge losses, and expectedly so. The Matuas (Dalits who are mostly migrants from Bangladesh) voted overwhelmingly for the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and also to a large extent in last year’s Assembly elections because of the saffron party’s promise of implementing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that would grant them Indian citizenship.

But non-implementation of the Act even after repeated promises made by the top party leadership including national president J.P.Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah has cost the BJP the support of the community.

The Trinamool won the Bongaon and Gobardanga municipalities that fall within the Bongaon Lok Sabha seat that is represented by the BJP’s Shantanu Thakur. Thakur, and BJP MLAs belonging to the Matua community, have been making noises about his party’s failure to implement the CAA. Matuas also have a strong presence in the municipalities in Nadia that were won by the Trinamool.

The Gorkha community has also turned away from the BJP. The saffron party has been winning the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat since 2009 due to overwhelming support of the Gorkhas who had been believing the BJP’s promise of finding a political solution to their demand for a separate state of ‘Gorkhaland’.

The support of the Gorkhas was also responsible for the BJP winning many seats in North Bengal in the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2021 Assembly polls. The BJP won all the six Lok Sabha seats of North Bengal--Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Raiganj and Balurghat--in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

In the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP won seven of the nine seats in Cooch Behar district, all the five seats in Alipurduar district, four of the seven seats in Jalpaiguri district, and five of the six seats in Darjeeling.

But the Trinamool staged a comeback in North Bengal’s Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur districts that the BJP had triumphed in just two years ago. The Trinamool won seven of the nine Assembly seats in Uttar Dinajpur and three of the six seats in Dakshin Dinajpur.

The Gorkhas, tribals, Koch-Rajbanshis, Matuas and other Dalit communities as well as first and second-generation Hindu migrants from Bangladesh had contributed to the BJP’s victories in North Bengal in 2019 and 2021. But over the last few months, these communities have clearly started withdrawing their support to the saffron party.

The victory of the newly-formed Hamro Party spells grave trouble for the BJP in Darjeeling, which the saffron party considers its safe seat. The Hamro Party was formed three months ago by Ajoy Edwards, a former leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) which is an ally of the BJP.

Edwards developed serious differences with his party after he was denied a ticket to contest the last Assembly polls from Darjeeling. The Darjeeling Assembly seat was to have gone to the GNLF under a seat-sharing formula agreed to by the two parties. But the BJP fielded its own candidate from this seat.

“The Hamro Party’s victory in Darjeeling shows that the Gorkhas have turned away from the BJP and no longer believe the tall promises made repeatedly by the party to find an amicable solution to the Gorkhaland issue,” said Nabin Rai, a young lecturer in political science at a government-run college in Darjeeling district.

Panchayat polls are due in Bengal next year and it does not take a political pundit to forecast that the Trinamool will sweep those polls also. The Trinamool will not need to deploy its muscle power, as it had so blatantly in 2018, to win the rural polls this time.

The BJP’s victories in the 2019 Lok Sabha and the 2021 Assembly elections were, to a significant extent, due to Left voters supporting the saffron party. But since last year, these Left voters have started withdrawing support to the BJP and are moving back to the Left. The results of the latest municipal elections provide a strong indication of a Left comeback in the state.

And the Trinamool is also covertly aiding this Left comeback in order to erode the BJP’s remaining support base in the state. The Trinamool is intent on denying the BJP a win in even one of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2024, and that is why it wants the Left to occupy the opposition space in the state.

That’s because the Left represents no threat to the Trinamool’s ‘national’ ambitions. The Trinamool hopes that denying the BJP a win in any of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal would adversely affect the saffron party’s overall national tally and it may then fail to cross the half-way mark to form the government at the Centre. That would allow the Trinamool, with its 40-plus MPs, to play a pivotal role in New Delhi and even propel Mamata Banerjee to the Prime Minister’s post.

While all that may be Trinamool’s wishful thinking, what is certain is that the BJP is in a downward spiral in Bengal and if this continues, it is not likely to win any Lok Sabha seat in Bengal. Whether that adversely affects the party at the national level in 2024 remains to be seen.

Also read:

-BJP in Bengal continues to besiege itself with self-inflicted crises, but why?

-BJP’s poor performance in Bengal civic polls holds no surprises; more ominous times lurk ahead