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Civic polls: Mamata relishes her Opposition-mukt Bengal moment
To say the Trinamool Congress juggernaut crushed the Opposition in the recently held municipal elections is understating the Opposition’s misery. The BJP came second, but won six wards. The CPI(M) and Congress drew a blank
Three major elections in the next four years and several adverse developments are enough to shake the confidence of most political leaders, but Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee seems to be an exception. Against the backdrop of an array of investigations in corruption charges against more than a dozen prominent leaders in her party, and the increasing noise and presence of the BJP on the streets of Bengal, she has essayed a victory in a few municipalities in West Bengal that seems to suggest there is no challenge to her position till 2021, the year the next assembly polls are slated to be held.
Banerjee is in her seventh year in power, and the results suggest that instead of anti-incumbency she is going from strength to strength. The numbers are quite revealing — victory in all seven municipalities with the ruling party making a clean sweep of all the wards in Durgapur, Haldia and Cooper’s Camp. In total, it won 142 of the 150 wards, or 95% of the seats in the fray. Though seven municipalities are rather a small number in a state with a population of more than nine crore, the point to note is that these civic bodies are uniformly distributed across the length of the state — Dhupguri and Buniadpur in the north, Durgapur and Nalhati in the middle and Cooper’s Camp, Haldia and Paskura in the south.
On paper, however, the ruling party had a number of formidable challenges. The Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate have started investigations into the high-profile Narada scam where no fewer than a dozen Trinamool leaders — ministers, MLAs and MPs — were seen accepting cash from the representative of a fictitious company. Two MPs — Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Tapas Pal — were held for a few months by the CBI in connection with the Rose Valley (another chit fund) scam.
To compound Banerjee’s troubles, there was a communal flare-up in Basirhat, an area adjacent to the West Bengal-Bangladesh border and the BJP accused the ruling party of creating a situation in the state that has increasingly made the Hindus vulnerable to attacks from the minorities.
But none of these worked.
To say the Trinamool juggernaut crushed the Opposition is understating the Opposition’s misery. The BJP came second, but won six wards. The CPI(M) and Congress drew a blank.
After the results Banerjee made it clear that she was relishing an ‘Opposition mukt Bengal’. The numbers indicate that more than posing a challenge to her, the challenge is actually before the BJP — to close the wide gulf that exists between itself and the Trinamool. The ruling party at the Centre has certainly emerged as the second force in West Bengal, but a very distant second. It came second in 77 wards, but that will hardly please party president Amit Shah who has declared Bengal to be one of the focus states for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
To explain the results, all Opposition parties have pointed out to the Trinamool’s muscle flexing both during the run-up to the polls and on August 13, the day of the elections. But in private some are candid enough to admit that even without this, the results would not have been vastly different.
The challenge before the BJP is to win seats, and push the vote share. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it cornered about 17% votes but only two seats of the 42 in the state. In 2016, it won about 10% votes but got only three MLAs in a house of 294. In the August 13 elections, it won four wards out of 16 — its best show — in Dhupguri municipality where the party could manage 41.59% of the votes against 48.51% of the Trinamool that won 12 wards.
The saffron camp has got seven to eight months to better its Dhupguri show in the rural polls next year to pose any challenge to the ruling party in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
avijit.ghosal@hindustantimes.com
