HOW THE BJP BREACHED DIDI’S BASTION
Forcing the Left to move Right, wooing TMC’s disgruntled leaders and building a strong organisation at the grassroots level were key elements of the BJP’s ‘Mission Bengal’ strategy
On May 30, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was taking oath for a second term in office, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee broke open a BJP office at Naihati in North 24 Parganas district and painted her party’s name—the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC)—and its symbol on its wall. Barely eight years after she brought the Left Front’s 34 years of rule to an end, Mamata faces a tough challenger in the shape of the BJP. The BJP has not only won many more seats—from 2 out of 42 in 2014 to now 18—it has also dramatically increased its vote share—from 16.8 per cent in 2014 to 40 per cent in 2019.
It all started in 2015, when BJP president Amit Shah sent 45-year-old Shiv Prakash, joint general secretary (organisation), who does not know a word of Bengali, to the state. The reason? To implement ‘Mission Bengal’. Prakash had closely worked with Shah in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Two
leaders from Madhya Pradesh—Kailash Vijayvargiya and Arvind Menon—were also sent to the state. At the time, Mamata enjoyed a 44 per cent vote share, though people were beginning to associate her party leaders with extortion and infringing on people’s democratic rights.
The TMC had won the 2016 assembly poll with a two-thirds majority, despite allegations of corruption against its leaders in the Saradha and Rose Valley ponzi schemes and the sting operation in which TMC leaders were seen taking cash on camera. “The situation was explosive against the ruling party. But we could not make use of it as hardly anyone in rural Bengal had the courage to hoist a BJP flag atop his house,” says a state BJP leader.
BUILDING A NETWORK
To begin with, the BJP started building a strong cadre-based foundation. And instead of having a top-heavy structure,
its karyakartas reached out to people in the decentralised enterprise. Each of the 20-odd blocks in a district was treated as a mandal of 60 booths, with roughly 40,000-50,000 voters. Each mandal was run by a committee of 12-36 members. Working under the mandals were shakti pramukhs with the specific target of increasing the party’s presence in five to six booths; booth palaks were given the responsibility of targeting two booths, or 2,000 voters each. The party engaged panna pramukhs to shadow 30-50 voters in each locality, befriending them and solving their problems. Party workers were made office-bearers of organisational units to give them a sense of ownership of the mission. Though each of the districts ended up having 30-40 leaders, it was never a case of too many cooks, as each was assigned a specific job and, irrespective of rank, given to understand that they were all Shah’s foot soldiers in Bengal.
Within one and a half years, the party increased the number of mandals from 484 to 1,250, shakti kendras from zero to 12,404 with more than 10,000 shakti pramukhs, and booth committees from zero to 58,000. The party also appointed 300 vistaraks for each of the 294 assembly constituencies. These were full-time workers, getting a monthly allowance of Rs 15,000, accommodation and a bike to travel to rural areas. The job of a vistarak was to set camp in a constituency, oversee organisational work and send weekly reports to the party headquarters. The party also created separate cells of teachers, advocates, musical troupes and Matuas (Bangladeshi Dalits who had crossed over to West Bengal).
USING THE NEW MEDIA
A 15,000-member WhatsApp group of the party reached out to 1.5 million voters. The BJP started a social media cell, under its national IT cell head Amit Malviya, with 10,000 people to reach areas where the party was finding it hard to penetrate due to the strong presence of the TMC. About 50,000 WhatsApp groups were created with a target of delivering messages to 30 million smartphones in the state.
SELECTING THE RIGHT CANDIDATES
“The RSS had given us a free hand to select candidates who could deliver. We were targeting prominent but disgruntled leaders of other parties, who could win seats. For instance, we needed a bahubali like Nisith Pramanik (sidelined TMC youth leader from Cooch Behar) to take on another bahubali (minister Rabindranath Ghosh); the party allowed us to select the candidate we wanted,” said Deboshree Choudhury, BJP state general secretary and now Raiganj MP. This allowed defectors from the Left and TMC to contest as BJP candidates, even as many senior BJP leaders
THE 2016 COOCH BEHAR BYPOLL BECAME A SUCCESSFUL TEMPLATE OF CONSOLIDATION OF ALL ANTITMC VOTES IN FAVOUR OF THE BJP
and state general secretaries were denied tickets. Dissatisfaction among the party workers was also contained. For instance, denied a ticket from Hooghly, the party’s state vice-president Raj Kamal Pathak resigned from his post. He was promptly sent to North Bengal, given the responsibility of organising Modi’s Siliguri rally, and ensuring the party’s victory in the region.
Candidates were also selected keeping in mind the demographic composition. “We barely got a fortnight for campaigning in the first two phases in areas like North Bengal. So we fielded known faces—John Barla, a tribal labour leader from the tea gardens, from the Alipurduar seat; and Kunar Hembram, the engineer who programmed software for the Alchiki script, was fielded from a tribal seat in Jhargram,” said Diptiman Sengupta , BJP leader from Cooch Behar. Even a former Left MLA like Khagen Murmu, with a strong base in Malda district, was allowed to contest immediately after joining the party.
Accusing Mamata of minority appeasement, the BJP advocated the need for a majority narrative. “Religious polarisation was the BJP’s trump card and Mamata fell into the trap. She tried to woo both the Hindus and the Muslims from the same dais by chanting mantras and quoting from the Quran, isolating her from both the communities,” says Prasanta Ray, former professor of Social Science, Presidency College.
The BJP fielded two Muslim candidates to convey the message that it was not communal as the other parties made it seem. “Having Muslim candidates was important to erase the communal tag and make the party acceptable among Left-inclined voters,” says Sengupta. In Malda, a minority-dominated district, 48 per cent Hindus voted for the BJP. While the BJP won in one seat—Malda(N), it lost Malda(S) by 8,000 votes.
THE LEFT MOVES RIGHT
The BJP left no stone unturned to eat into the Left’s vote share. The Left had a 29.7 per cent vote share in the 2014 Lok Sabha election and 33.5 per cent in the 2016 assembly poll. The BJP’s vote share could increase by a transfer of votes from the Left, as was established in the 2016 Cooch Behar Lok Sabha bypoll, where a loss of 27 per cent vote share from the Forward Bloc and its direct transfer to the BJP helped it move to second position from fourth. Cooch Behar became a successful template of consolidation of all anti-TMC votes in favour of the BJP.
“Winning the support and confidence of the Left in the battle against the TMC was easier as the former was a natural enemy of the latter and it had suffered the most at the hands of the ruling party and the state administration. The BJP came out in support of Left workers who were facing allegedly false cases or were scared to return to their villages after the TMC came to power,” says Mohit Ray, a former professor at Jadavpur University.
The TMC was also accused of rounding up BJP leaders in false cases; Prakash was allegedly falsely implicated in a rape case in October 2018 for which he got anticipatory bail. “Mamata’s administration maligned the image of our leaders,” says state BJP president Dilip Ghosh.
The BJP held many closed-door meetings with district-level Left leaders. “For Left cadre, the party office is more than a political space. After the TMC came to power, several Left offices were forcefully acquired. Our leaders assured the return of these offices to the Left, if they came to power,” says a BJP leader. At the Churabanda rally in Jalpaiguri, Modi made special mention of the CPI(M)-run Siliguri municipal corporation as a victim of Mamata’s discriminatory politics. The idea was to give Left supporters the message that the PM was aware of how Didi was depriving an elected civic body of its dues just because it was run by her political opponents. Incidentally, a day after Modi’s landslide win, nearly 10 CPI(M) party offices were handed over to the Left and the red flag fluttered again in Cooch Behar, Birbhum, North 24 Parganas and Hooghly districts. The Left was no longer a threat to the BJP. Its vote share had dipped to an all-time low: from 29 per cent in 2014 to 7 per cent in 2019.
“The shifting of the Left vote is a narrative floated by the media. It created the political binary backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as if the state had only two parties. But look at the booth-wise results, the TMC is melting. The dip in our vote share and the increase in the BJP’s vote share shouldn’t be simplified in numerical terms. Voters are driven by many factors—a fact highlighted by the PM. I believe the culture of Bengal, as reflected by the Left liberals, will prevail in the long run,” says former CPI(M) MP Mohammad Salim.
Political pundits say the BJP did not allow the Congress and Left to form a credible, secular third front, which could have damaged its chances of making the most of the anti-incumbency votes. “In Bengal, the contest was between the TMC and the BJP. And the latter made sure that the antiincumbency votes did not get split,” says Biswanath Chakraborty, professor of political science at the Rabindra Bharati University.
MAMATA TRIED TO WOO HINDUS AS WELL AS MUSLIMS FROM THE SAME DAIS BY CHANTING MANTRAS AND QUOTING FROM THE QURAN. IT ALIENATED BOTH