BJP Win In Tripura Has Unnerved Mamata Banerjee, And It Shows

After unseating the well-entrenched Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) from power in Tripura, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will now set its sights on Bengal. This is evident from BJP president Amit Shah’s statement that his party will concentrate in and win Bengal, apart from Odisha and Karnataka, “in the coming days”. Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is, thus, unnerved, and her ugly remarks (“a cockroach trying to become a peacock by putting on its feathers”) betray her nervousness.

The BJP’s spectacular win in Tripura by routing the CPI-M there will have its fallout in Bengal, and Banerjee knows that. The win holds immense significance in Bengal since it has proved that no matter how well entrenched a party is in power, a well-designed and aggressive campaign highlighting the failings of that party can lead to fantastic electoral dividends. And this is what the BJP will do in Bengal as well.

Banerjee’s failings are many, and she knows it only too well. The state’s economy is in a mess (read this article), few jobs have been created, big-ticket investments still elude Bengal (thanks to Banerjee chasing the Tata small car factory away), and resentment against Banerjee’s mercurial actions and faulty policies, as well as the politics of minority appeasement, is brewing. She has been walking away with the credit of centrally-sponsored welfare schemes and projects, and she knows that an aggressive BJP can unmask her clever falsehoods.

For the BJP, the win in Tripura is significant. The false impression that Bengalis are naturally inclined towards the Left has been shattered. Banerjee may have unseated the CPI-M-led Left Front from Bengal seven years ago, but she did so by being more left than the Left. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee regime was overthrown after Banerjee successfully portrayed the Left Front government (in power at that time) to have turned bourgeois and pro-capital for courting big industrialists. Banerjee has been trying to strengthen the impression that Bengali Hindus are distinct from their co-religionists in the Hindi heartland and will thus never support the BJP. That myth has been busted in Tripura.

The Bengal BJP has been massively enthused by the win in Tripura. Even a year ago, few would have given the BJP even an outside chance of winning in Tripura. At present, fewer still will bet on Banerjee being unseated from power in Bengal. The popular impression was that the CPI-M was too firmly entrenched in power and far too strong a political power for the BJP to even make a dent in Tripura. The same is the impression with Banerjee in Bengal. But the BJP has proved in Tripura that such impressions can be vastly misleading. And, having proved that in Tripura, the BJP is raring to repeat the feat in Bengal. Reason enough for Banerjee to get very concerned.

Banerjee is also acutely aware of the skeletons in her cupboard. The ghosts of Narada and Sarada (the two ponzi schemes that defrauded crores of people of Bengal of their hard-earned millions and from which her party and many in her party benefited from immensely) can return to haunt and damage her anytime. The Central Bureau of Investigation probes in to the two scams hang like Damocles swords over her head. She knows that the screws can be tightened on corrupt leaders in her party any time and her Achilles heel is her nephew Abhishek Banerjee (who she is grooming to be her successor) and her brothers who have benefitted unduly over the past seven years that she has been in power. Exposes on them would permanently tarnish Mamata’s reputation and deliver a crushing blow to her.

Banerjee knows that an aggressive BJP will turn the spotlight on her nephew, brothers and on corrupt leaders of the Trinamool Congress. There are many skeletons that can tumble out of the Trinamool’s cupboards and Banerjee is mortally scared at the prospect of that happening. Hence, her false bravado and her increasing desperation to stitch together an anti-BJP front at the national level that, she fervently hopes, will be able to stave off the BJP juggernaut. Banerjee is even willing to join hands in an unholy alliance with her bete noire – the CPI-M – to ward off the BJP.

Banerjee knows that the first fallout of an aggressive campaign by the BJP in Bengal will be the shift of the Congress vote bank (5 per cent to 7 per cent across Bengal) to the BJP, as has happened in Tripura. That will be followed by the consolidation of the anti-Trinamool votes and a Hindu consolidation. Banerjee knows that her politics of blatant and shameless minority appeasement has put off many Bengali Hindus, who are slowly gravitating towards the BJP. She wants to arrest this, and has thus been visiting mandirs, mouthing Sanskrit shlokas and organising Brahmin sammelans. Like in Tripura, even Left supporters can shift their electoral allegiance to the BJP and in Bengal, that has already started happening with many left supporters and activists joining the BJP out of their anti-Trinamool feelings. Banerjee knows that her support base has already plateaued and can only decline from here if a strong opposition emerges.

Banerjee is also acutely aware of the fact that her party, which has no ideology worth the name, is made up of many opportunists, defectors and fence-sitters, who will ditch her at the first signs of trouble. That was how the Trinamool gained strength in Bengal. Once the going gets tough for her in Bengal, as it is bound to in the near future, many of her trusted lieutenants will surely abandon her. She knows that brand Banerjee alone will not work then.

Banerjee defeated the CPI-M by using the Marxists’ own tricks against them. In the run-up to the 2011 assembly polls in Bengal (where she unseated the Left), hundreds of CPI-M musclemen joined her and she could thus defeat the CPI-M’s formidable poll machinery. She also had the support of the Union government, which ensured a level playing field during the polls through effective deployment of central forces. She knows that the goons she now harbours can also ditch her and the poll rigging tactics she has copied from the CPI-M can easily be defeated by strict vigil. A resurgent BJP will not allow her to rig polls in Bengal any more, and that is bad news for her.

That is why Banerjee went out of her way to belittle the BJP’s victory in Tripura. But that only betrayed her nervousness at the prospect of the BJP turning its attention to Bengal. She knows that the BJP will now deploy its formidable organisational strength and tactics to winning in Bengal exactly as it did in Tripura. She is scared of that and her default reaction is, thus, her familiar rants against the BJP. But Banerjee’s verbal volleys won’t scare off the BJP or deter it from training all its guns on her. She knows that too, and that is why she is running scared and desperate.