As West Bengal's politics shifts, BJP likely to gain

New Delhi: One of the country’s last bastions of secular politics, West Bengal, seems to be crumbling under the weight of communalisation. With the resurgence of the BJP, anti-minority feeling is spreading rapidly, particularly in Kolkata, which once prided itself for protecting minority rights.

While the Congress had virtually disintegrated over the years in the state, the influence of the Left parties too has been on the wane. Statistics show that the Left won less than 10 per cent of seats in the 2016 Assembly polls. In the 2018 panchayat polls, the Left parties slipped to third place behind the Trinamul Congress and the BJP.

The fight in the state is mainly between the Trinamul Congress and the BJP. West Bengal, one of the most politically crucial states of India, will undergo a lengthy seven-phase polling, starting from April 11.

Moving around recently in Kolkata, which has four Lok Sabha seats (Kolkata South, Kolkata North, Jadavpur and Dum Dum), one can sense simmering anti-minority sentiments. The BJP’s one-point agenda in West Bengal is to polarise votebanks. This seems to be working in the urban areas in particular.

Members of a housing society at Karaya Road in Park Circus have apparently decided to block the entry of any Muslim tenants. “We have decided not allow Muslims in our society,” an association member told this newspaper. A senior journalist, who once used to attack the BJP’s “communal politics”, is now ranting against the TMC for appointing Firhad Hakim as Kolkata’s mayor. “How can  Kolkata have a Muslim mayor,” he asked. A Bengali businessman from Salt Lake accused Mamata Banerjee of “Muslim appeasement”. Ajoy Mukherjee, a resident of north Kolkata who drives Uber cabs, indicated his preference for the BJP. “Didi only thinks of Muslims,” he said, and added: “Look at the Muslim population in Bengal. It is growing rapidly. The demography is changing.”

Madhusudan, a bookshop owner at College Street, felt that “Hindus are losing their voice in Bengal”. Ms Banerjee’s welfare scheme of monthly doles to imams have not gone down well with a large section of the Bengali middle class.

In one of his recent election rallies in the state, BJP president Amit Shah, playing the polarisation card, said: “The Mamata Banerjee government provided a monthly allowance to imams, but not to priests.”  He also accused Ms Banerjee of imposing Urdu in schools.

Of the 42 Lok Sabha berths in West Bengal,  the BJP chief has set a target of 23 seats. If the anti-minority feelings sweeping much of Kolkata translate into votes, and a similar feeling spills over into rural Bengal, if not 23, the BJP could be looking at anything between eight to 10 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The party has two MPs from the state at this point. As for voteshare, in the 2011 Assembly polls, the BJP got only four per cent of the vote. This jumped to 17 per cent in the 2014 general election. The BJP feels that the four-cornered fight in the state will only help the party to improve its tally.

Muslims, who constitute nearly 30 per cent of West Bengal’s population, are clearly backing Ms Banerjee. The BJP is trying desperately to consolidate the Hindu votebank in the state.

What appears to have hurt Bengali sentiments was Ms Banerjee’s move to halt the immersion of Durga idols to allow tazia processions during Muharram in 2017. This dangerous mix of politics and religion gave the BJP an opportunity to sneak in and unleash its mechanism to polarise the votebank. Ram Navami, which had been an obscure festival in West Bengal, suddenly took on new significance with  thousands of RSS and BJP workers armed with swords and lathis holding processions across the state last year.

While the Bengali “bhadralok” appear to be falling for the BJP’s muscular nationalism and aggressive Hindutva, the party’s road to power Bengal also lies through the former Maoist hotbed, popularly called Junglemahal (Purulia, Jhargram, West Midnapore and Bankura districts). The shift in the tribal belt was evident as the Trinamul Congress lost at least 34 per cent of the panchayat seats in these three districts, while the BJP has won 150 panchayats in these areas.