Aspiration Now Craves Vikas In West Bengal
After TMC Raw Deal
The opportunities for the ruling BJP in the 42 MP and 295
MLA delivering state of West Bengal need to be urgently re-evaluated.
This more so, because the deteriorating law and order and
security situation in West Bengal has
been a case for national concern for some time.
It is a border state, aiding and abetting a crescendo of
anti-national activity. Analysts looking at West Bengal are alarmed at the
increasing Islamic terrorist infiltration, financed by Pakistan’s ISI, and
routed via Bangladesh.
There is an opportunity for BJP to unseat the TMC; with
the general elections in 2019, presaging the state assembly elections in 2021.
The belligerence of the state’s 27% Muslim population
with Wahabi-Salafist agent provocateurs amongst them, has increased in
direct proportion to the pandering from a hopelessly dependent TMC. This suggests
the state’s Hindus, fed up with Mamata Banerjee’s antics, have deserted the
TMC.
In Uttar Pradesh, the 80% plus showing, at 325 out of 403,
has been made possible because of elaborate electoral engineering, and the
Prime Minister’s extensive campaigning on the poll plank of “Sabka Saath, Sabka
Vikas”.
This spectacular win included the votes of a significant
number of young Muslim men and women. And this, for the second time after 2014,
when also about 10% of the Muslim vote came to the BJP.
A similar breaching of the TMC’s Muslim vote bank in West
Bengal can possibly be replicated. This, particularly targeting the moderates
not enamoured of the Salafists, Shia’s, the aspirational young, and Muslim
women who want a uniform civil code and triple talaq gone. Added to a
consolidation of the multi-caste Hindu vote, it could work very well.
In the North-Eastern state of Manipur, the third of the “seven
sisters” to recently choose BJP, the party came from
nothing. In a largely Christian state (2nd place after Hindus,
according to the 2011 census),BJP unseated the three-term Congress government
with a 36% popular vote to Congress’ 35%.
In West Bengal, the number of confrontations and clashes between
the Hindus and Muslims has been
increasing exponentially. Some open rioting in Dhulagarh recently, and in Malda
before, is sought to be hushed up by the TMC.
Nevertheless, it all suggests
that a natural polarisation has taken place and can be exploited.
This even as the
Shahi Imam of Kolkata’s Tipu Sultan Masjid, Maulana Nurur Rahman Barkati has
promised Rs. 25 lakhs to anyone who shaves the Prime Minister’s hair and beard.
He also wants Dilip Ghosh, the BJP state president, a political critic of both the Imam, his Salafist
henchmen, and the Chief Minister, to be stoned and thrown out of Bengal.
Meanwhile the RSS is steadily working on the ground to
increase the BJP vote share, much to the TMC’s chagrin.
The radicalised Muslim organisations, not to be outdone,
have asked for bans against RSS run schools. This is currently being
implemented meekly by the TMC.
Other Muslims have asked for curbs against the popular
Saraswati and Durga Pujas, renaming of customs and terms to remove their Hindu
connotations ( e.g. Ramdhonu), and so on.
Wads of counterfeit notes are infiltrating the state’s
borders at Malda, and bomb-making factories and stashes have been found several
times in Burdwan.
The TMC government, already mired in chit fund scams, has
been one of the most vocal critics of the recent demonetisation. This even as
the state has been discovered to harbour
a very large number of shell companies used to channel black money. Huge
stashes of demonetised notes are being unearthed even to this day.
With all this, let us remember that excesses of similar
magnitude saw the Congress governments of West Bengal thrown out in 1977, never
to return.
And 32-34 years later, exactly the same thing happened to
a seemingly impregnable Left Front too.
The people of West Bengal finally voted against the Left
Front in the 2009 general elections, giving 19 seats to TMC to their 15. This presaged
their ouster from power altogether in 2011.
The voting public responded
to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s calls for “Poriborton” for the first time
in 2011, alongside her alliterative Maa Maati Maanush sloganeering.
It was in the backdrop of the debacle of Singur and the
expulsion of the CPI(M) spawned Nano car project.
Despite the activist-style populism, the people expected
overall progress and prosperity from “Didi”. Mamata Banerjee’s no frills public
persona, simplicity, a no make-up look, unkempt hair, trademark crumpled white
cotton sari with minimal border, and Hawaii chappals, was reassuringly “one of
us”, to the poor.
She had also well established street activist
credentials, came from the lower middle class herself, and had been put in
hospital more than once by CPI(M) goons for her troubles.
Coming to power in a coalition (184 seats to TMC) with
the Congress (INC- 42 seats), as she did, atop a public, subjected to 34 years
of Marxist indoctrination, she looked and seemed perfect for the part.
But, if her first
five years were hoped to be a gradual return of economic liberalism, a nexus between a booming Marwari
led Borobazaar, and the heyday of the mercantile/mercantilist BhadraLok,
it certainly didn’t turn out that way.
Except, perhaps, for a mushrooming of
real estate projects in Kolkata.
The public debt till 2016 was at $ 45 billion tending
towards50 billion in 2017. The GDP of the state is at $ 140.68 billion as of
2015-16. So, public debt is at more than a third of GDP!
For a population of 95.5 million, the per capita income
is $1,473. West Bengal, however, thanks to its size, has great potential. It
is, even now, the 6th largest economy in the country overall.
Nevertheless, the TMC, a near dictatorship of one, is clearly
even further Left than the Left Front, with a far worse attitude to law and
order.
Since 2011, the majority community has watched in dismay
as the TMC supplanted their less than reliable electoral faith with the support
of West Bengal’s Muslim population. It then stitched together a rural bastion
composed of Muslims, OBCs, and the Maoists in “Jungle Mahal”.
It ruthlessly uses strong-arm methods and the former
CPI(M) enforcers, working now for the TMC.
But, it confounded critics by winning a thumping Assembly victory with 44.9% of the popular
vote (24, 564, 523 votes), and 211 seats on its own in 2016. At least 17% of
the vote must have come from Hindus, but how exactly was it extracted?
Can the BJP rework the electoral mathematics and mine the
popular discontent, intensifying its efforts now, for 2019?
The way to do this may consist of reviving West Bengal’s
mercantile past DNA, and the nation-wide appeal of Prime Minister Modi’s
clarion call of Vikas.
The alternative, after all, is a blatantly thuggish TMC,
which delivers gains, not to the masses, but to their sinister organisers.
The BJP has indeed been growing in West Bengal. It
overtook the Congress in the popular vote share in 2014, even as the latter
bagged 4 seats with a concentrated popular vote of just 9.58%.
BJP drew even with the CPI(M), with just 2 seats won each,
but it was runner-up in 3 more, with a 16.8% vote share.
The CPI(M), in a how-the-mighty-have-fallen mode, managed
only 2 seats in 2014, but with a scattered popular vote share of 29.71%.
The TMC won 34
seats, with a vote share of 39.05% then. But will it lose to a resurgent BJP,
almost certain to get another five years at the centre, once in 2019, and once again, in the state
assembly election in 2021?
For: The Sunday Guardian
(1,260 words)
March 17th, 2017
Gautam Mukherjee
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