KOLKATA: Bengal’s voters have decided to hand over the reins of governance to BJP, effecting a seismic change in state politics whose aftershocks will be felt way beyond the state’s borders.The Trinamool Congress fortress in Bengal crumbled under the twin onslaught of a strong anti-incumbency sentiment and a voter roll reduced by nearly 12% by the SIR process to give BJP a historic win in a state often described as the last frontier for a party that has been in office at the Centre since 2014.For the record, BJP won 202 seats and was leading in four more, bagging 45.8% of the votes polled. Trinamool saw its vote share slip from 48% in 2021 to 40.8% this poll — indicating a shift away from a party that championed Bengal nativism over nationalist politics — as it saw its 225 seats in the outgoing assembly whittled down to a two-figure number (81 leads and wins).
Some Trinamool strongholds, like South 24 Parganas, East Burdwan and Howrah, staunched the vote haemorrhage from the party but the BJP more than made up for this obduracy by winning a majority of seats in large swathes of the state from the north to the south. BJP’s dominance in the north was near-total, nearly blanking out Trinamool till North Dinajpur. And several other districts in the south — Jhargram, Purulia, East Midnapore — actually blanked out the Trinamool entirely. The highest margin for BJP came in Matigara-Naxalbari (1.4 lakh votes), which reinforced the strong anti-incumbency message.But what hurt Trinamool and helped BJP most was the backing the saffron party got from a large section of urban and suburban voters in Kolkata and its fringes, ranging from seats in South 24 Parganas skirting Kolkata in the south to the old-industry belts in Howrah and North 24 Parganas along the river.Trinamool saw its southern fortress crumble, losing 10 seats in Kolkata (including Rashbehari, Jadavpur, Shyampukur, Jorasanko, Maniktala), a large swathe of North 24 Parganas (Barrackpore, Bidhannagar, Dum Dum and, most importantly, Panihati, where the raped and murdered RG Kar junior doctor’s mother was the BJP candidate) and Howrah (a notable BJP win here was Rudranil Ghosh’s).Trinamool had 123 of the 142 seats in Kolkata, North and South 24 Parganas, Nadia, How-rah, Hooghly, East Burdwan in 2021; this time, it won only 48. It was this belt that made the difference between victory and defeat for both parties. Congress and Left Front returned to the assembly after a gap of five years. Congress won two seats (both in Malda) and the LF won one (in Murshidabad) with ISF retaining Bhangar. All this will give the new assembly a multi-colour hue rather than the two-coloured assembly of 2021.A few factors swung the vote for BJP and away from Trinamool, the two most important being a distinct anti-incumbency sentiment among a large section of the electorate and the SIR process (that knocked out more than 91 lakh voters). “Logical discrepancy” alone deleted 60 lakh voters from the roll, many of whom could just watch their friends and neighbours — and, in some cases, even their own families — voting. It cannot be said with any degree of certainty what the result would have been had the these voters not been excluded but anecdotal evidence and a look at exclusion figures suggest that a majority of those left out were women and minority community voters, sections that were more receptive of their Didi’s message.This exclusionary process was helped by the anti-incumbency sentiment that cut across urban and rural booths as incidents like the R G Kar rape-murder scarred Bengal’s voter-scape.That — and PM Modi’s repeated pleas for “paribartan” — seemed to have swayed a large section of voters.BJP promised many things to many sections of the electorate in the campaign phase. Promises of enhanced handouts were there for the class that gained most from Banerjee’s social-welfare schemes. The party, for instance, promised to double the Lakshmir Bhandar dole from Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,000 (and rename it Annapurna Bhandar). Female voters’ turnout this election was 93.2%, more than the average turnout of 92.9%, but this bloc was more evenly split this time.Promises of factories and jobs returning to Bengal were there for the class of the Bengali population that felt it had not gained much from 15 years of Trinamool in office.Likewise, for the average Hindu voter cutting across language barriers, there was the stated promise of a Bengal that would not be overrun by Bangladeshi (Muslim) immigrants. And, specifically for the average Hindu voter whose mother tongue was not Bengali, there was the unstated promise of Bengal being governed like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where the rule of law would be enforced by the bulldozer if the normal could process could not deliver justice. The use of the bulldozer as a prop in some election campaigns was not an accident.This cocktail — of something for all sub-groups (except Muslims) — proved too heady for Trinamool to counter. Till 2021, most voters bought the argument that Didi was different from her party. Five more years in office and that argument looked frayed; many looked for succour from the top when they were being throttled by the bottom rung of Trinamool in their own neighbourhoods. Unfortunately for voters — and unfortunately for Trinamool — that succour often did not come, prompting many ordinary citizens to turn away from the party to which they had sworn eternal gratitude for booting out the Left Front 15 years ago.Many voters also felt that there was a huge gulf between what Didi stood for (a soft, socialistic administrative approach that manifested itself in many of the social-welfare schemes for the poor and the marginalised) and what her party cadre did on the ground.All this was boosted by BJP’s new-found resolve to fight. Yes, PM Modi remained BJP’s vote-catcher. And the presence of central-force boots on the ground gave courage to anti-incumbency voters to come out and vote.But it was one incident this March — even before the EC announced the poll schedule — that showed which the way the wind was blowing across Bengal, where violence is a way of life in politics. Sashi Panja, a senior minister in the outgoing cabinet, had to barricade herself inside her Central Avenue home along with some aides and cops as BJP supporters showered brick and stone chips.It was above all that afternoon fracas — so common in Bengal politics — that indicated a paribartan when very few, even among state BJP seniors, were predicting a change. PM Modi’s first “chun-chun ke hisab liya jayega” speech, delivered a few days later from a campaign dais, bolstered BJP workers and the anti-incumbency voter to deliver a knockout punch to Trinamool.
