View: Will the 56-inch non-Bengali finally give Bengal an opposition?

Will Bengal think today, what India thought yesterday? Gopal Krishna Gokhale may not be the best way to channel the overwrought, neurotic and hysterical state that West Bengal finds itself in on the final day of Elections 2019. But eight years after Mamata Banerjee chappalled out the Left Front government and chappalled in to power, it’s West Bengal’s voters’ turn to decide what to do with the nationwide fiveyear tried-and-tested BJP that’s now huffing and puffing and trying to blow Didi’s house down.

I was here in Kolkata on May 13, 2011, when Bengal with its 42 parliamentary seats, experienced ‘Paribartan’ — Change — after 34 years of uninterrupted CPM-Left Front rule. More than regime change, what I had expected was something that West Bengal had been lacking since 1977: an Opposition. A de facto one, at any rate. That didn’t happen, with Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress pretty much gobbling up the whole electoral and democratic space it inherited from a hammered-and-sickled Left.

While there is much consternation from many quarters about BJP ‘taking over Bengal’, this election could finally see one-party/front rule change to something that most other Indian states have been familiar with for decades: a government checked and tempered by an opposition. The political force of such a likely ‘paribartan’, hardly imaginable in Bengal by Bengal’s older voters, is far greater than that from a possible regime change coming any time soon to an assembly election theatre near them.

This is made palpable in all the theories swirling around in the state — an ‘understanding’ between Trinamool and BJP to snuff out the remnants of the Left; an ‘arrangement’ between CPM and BJP to see Didi gone; and even the conspiracy theory (with understandable less traction) of a covert TMCCPM booth-level ‘tie-up’ to keep the ‘56 inch non-Bengali’ out. The mystery of who destroyed the Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar statue during BJP president Amit Shah’s roadshow recently being a deplored (by all parties) spin-off of this chaotic, voters’ parlour game.

Much media space has already been given to the supposed trend of many 2014 Left Front voters

(29.71% of the vote share) voting for the BJP (17.02% in 2014) this time. But there has also been a quieter narrative of disgruntled 2014 TMC voters (39.05%) switching to the BJP for the same reason: to get rid of Didi. If one is to believe either or both these trends that benefit BJP, this election in Bengal is not about a ‘Modi wave’, or demonetisation, GST, Balakot, etc. Instead, it will be a mandate for or against Didi, with enough signs of anti-incumbency.

But why is the Left — the original candidate for being more than just a nominal Opposition since 2011 — not being seen as a option for those disgruntled with Didi? More than one person whom I met last week gave this explanation: ‘The Left is weak, and with its resources, the BJP is in a far better position to remove Didi [in the 2021 assembly polls].”

Khokhon Ghosh Dastidar, CPM leader and onetime poll officer of ex-CM Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, even told me two days before Kolkata goes to polls, “Aage Ram, porey baam” (First Ram [BJP], later Left), a sentiment echoed by more than a few attending the Modi rally in Sultanpur village in South 24 Parganas on Thursday. Of course, there are enough voters, especially in urban areas like Kolkata this time, who want Modi to provide his ‘magic touch’ in moribund Bengal the way the PM has, in their view, transformed ‘India’. But this largely ‘non-Bengali’ group, both the business community as well as the proletariat class originally from adjoining states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh and UP, is small compared to alleged ‘tactical voters’ not smitten by Modi, but driven by their growing antipathy towards Didi’s ‘benefits for only her charmed circle’ feudal politics.

If morning shows the day, however, for those seeking to ‘use Modi to punish Didi’, unintended consequences far more debilitating than the destruction of statues may await. For one, the muscle power and violence on display this election has been more than just the ‘usual’ turf wars prevalent for decades. In theory, ‘Jai Sri Rams!’ from bikers in rural Bengal may be a completely legit expression. But they do have a larger Hindutva-fuelled, if not Hindutva, project in mind that has already, with TMC pushback, created deeper ‘Hindu pride-Muslim appeasement’, ‘Indian (read: non-Bengali)-Bengali’ rifts that are worrying beyond electoral politics.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the first lowercased ‘paribartan’ came to Bengal when Trinamool won 19 parliamentary seats, leaving the Left Front behind with 15. If LS 2019 is the other morning that shows the 2021 day, then the only thing that a wellwisher of West Bengal can wish for is that the state finally gets an Opposition worth its job description. And such a well-wisher can only hope that whichever party does become Bengal’s first real Opposition since 1977, won’t tear the state down imported dotted lines from end to end.