Battleground Bengal: Decoding The BJP’s Strategy Of Fielding MPs In Assembly Polls

Many eyebrows were raised when BJP national general secretary Arun Singh released the party’s list of candidates for the third and fourth phases of the forthcoming Assembly elections in Bengal.

Because prominent among the candidates were four sitting members of Parliament--three from the Lok Sabha and one from the Rajya Sabha.

It is quite unusual for a party to field its sitting MPs for state Assembly elections. More so since the Lok Sabha MPs have not even completed two years of their five-year tenures.

One of the Lok Sabha MPs--Babul Supriyo--is also a junior Union minister. Rarely has a Union Minister contested an Assembly election.

Some political analysts in Bengal have erroneously attributed this move by the BJP to what they think is the paucity of suitable candidates for some constituencies.

The Trinamool also dubbed the BJP’s move to field sitting MPs in the Assembly elections as an indication of the saffron party’s lack of bench strength.

But the decision to field the four MPs is a smart strategic move that conveys a powerful message: that the BJP is not only confident of winning the Assembly elections and forming the government in Bengal, but is also confident of winning back the three Lok Sabha seats in the bypolls that will follow a few months from now.

The three Lok Sabha MPs who will contest the Assembly polls are Asansol MP Babul Supriyo who will be contesting from Tollygunge, Hooghly MP Locket Chatterjee who has been fielded from Chunchura (this Assembly segment is part of the Hooghly Lok Sabha seat) and Coochbehar MP Nishit Pramanik who will contest from Dinhata Assembly seat (which is also part of his Lok Sabha constituency).

Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta will be contesting from Tarakeswar Assembly seat. Dasgupta was nominated to the Upper House in April 2016, and his term thus gets over in April next year.

According to BJP bigwigs, there are multiple messages that the move to field MPs in Assembly polls conveys.

They said it sends a message to the people of Bengal that the BJP is serious about running an efficient government that will turnaround the state’s fortunes and take it on the path of ‘Sonar Bangla’ that the party has promised.

“A strong message goes out to the people that the BJP government in Bengal will have competent people like Swapan Dasgupta, Babul Supriyo and others running it. Pramanik and Chatterjee are also very popular leaders who have gained considerable experience as parliamentarians and that experience will be put to good use in running the state,” said a senior BJP organisational leader.

There is another motive in fielding Supriyo from Tollygunge. There are indications that Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee may contest from Tollygunge, apart from Nandigram.

Tollygunge is considered to be a safe seat by the Trinamool and Mamata Banerjee herself hinted that she would contest from there as well while announcing the list of her party candidates earlier this month.

She had announced the name of Aroop Biswas as the Trinamool candidate from Tollygunge, but had paused after taking his name and said: “I may also contest from Tollygunge”.

Trinamool insiders say that Banerjee is not very confident of winning from Nandigram and that is why she wants to contest from Tollygunge as well.

But by fielding Babul Supriyo from Tollygunge, the BJP has queered the pitch for Banerjee. The Union minister will be a formidable opponent to an embattled Mamata Banerjee.

Babul Supriyo is a well-known figure and has strong connections with the Bangla film industry that operates largely out of Tollygunge (hence the ‘Tollywood’ moniker it is known by).

Tollygunge has been won by the Trinamool for the last five terms since the party was formed in 1998. Pankaj Banerjee, who was with the Congress, wrested the seat from CPI(M) veteran Prasanta Sur in 1996.

Tollygunge was a communist bastion before it switched allegiance to the Trinamool. Sur had won from the seat for four consecutive terms from 1977--the year the Left came to power in Bengal--to 1991.

Pankaj Banerjee was a co-founder of the Trinamool and he represented the seat for two terms (1996 to 2006). He quit politics after a fallout with Mamata Banerjee, and the Trinamool fielded close Mamata aide Aroop Biswas from the seat in 2006. Biswas has won Tollygunge in 2006, 2011 and 2016.

The poll battles in Tollygunge have always been close since the late 1980s with the winner garnering less than a couple of thousand votes more than his nearest rival. In 1991, CPI(M)’s Prasanta Sur won the seat by just 322 votes.

Aroop Biswas won the seat in 2006 by only 526 votes, but he trounced his CPI(M) rival in 2011 by more than 27,000 votes. But that can be attributed to the wave in favour of Mamata Banerjee that year.

Biswas’s victory margin declined to 9896 votes in 2016. The BJP’s vote share has been increasing since 2011 when it came a poor third by bagging only a 1.6 percent vote share. This went up to 7.66 per cent in 2016.

The BJP’s vote share from Tollygunge Assembly segment (it is part of Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency) went up dramatically in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

Babul Supriyo’s chances of winning from Tollygunge this time are said to be bright.

If Mamata files her nominations from Tollygunge, which goes to the polls in the fourth phase on 10 April, the BJP is sure to deploy its top campaigners in this seat in order to mount a tough challenge to the Trinamool supremo.

Apart from ‘checkmate Tollygunge’, the BJP’s Locket Chatterjee and Nishit Pramanik are sure to win from Chuchura and Dinhata respectively.

Locket Chatterjee had secured a formidable win over her nearest Trinamool rival by a lead of over 73,000 votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP’s vote share in Hooghly has been increasing dramatically--from a meagre 3.42 per cent in 2009, it went up to 16.4 per cent in 2014 and then to 46.03% in 2019.

Locket Chatterjee also got a lead from Chuchura Assembly segment in 2019. Since then, she has done a lot of work for the constituency and is popular among the masses.

Ditto with Nishit Pramanik, who posted a conclusive win from Coochbehar Lok Sabha constituency in 2019 by a margin of nearly 55,000 votes. Here, too, the Dinhata Assembly segment of the Lok Sabha seat gave him a good lead.

Tarakeswar Assembly seat is also a segment within the Hooghly Lok Sabha seat and Locket Chatterjee got a respectable lead from this seat as well in 2019.

Former IPS officer Rachpal Singh, who joined the Trinamool, has been winning Tarakeswar Assembly seat since 2011. But his vote share declined in 2016. Also, he has become quite unpopular in his constituency because of his haughtiness and failure to establish a good rapport with his electorate.

That is why the Trinamool leadership denied him a ticket and decided to field Ramendu Singha, a party functionary with a grassroots connect. But Singha dwarfs in comparison to Swapan Dasgupta.

Tarakeswar is a Hindu-majority constituency and Muslims form only a small percentage of the electorate. It is also a place of pilgrimage--the place gets its name from the famous Taraknath mandir dedicated to Bhagwan Shiva.

Tarakeswar also has a very high literacy rate (85 per cent) and has a fair exposure to the outside world. As such, the decision to field Swapan Dasgupta, an articulate, well-known columnist and commentator who is a regular on TV channels, is a clever move on the part of the BJP.

The soft-spoken Dasgupta with impeccable manners is a quintessential Bengali bhadralok and that will work well in Tarakeswar.

Thus, fielding these four members of Parliament from as many Assembly seats in Bengal, far from being a desperate (for alleged paucity of candidates) move by the BJP, is an astute one.