Apart from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, where the BJP lost over four dozen seats, West Bengal is another major state that delivered a significant shock to senior party leaders. According to political experts and senior leaders of the party, what went wrong for the BJP in Bengal is not raising alleged ‘land grab’ issues, factional feuds, over-dependence on turncoat leadership and alleged actions of indulging in corruption while claiming to fight corruption.
The BJP tally in West Bengal has slipped by six seats from the 2019 general elections. The party lost some of its stronghold seats as Mamata Banerjee succeeded in making a dent in BJP’s bastion of tribal and OBC votes. Of the six seats the party has lost, at least three are from Jangalmahal — Jhargram, Bankura and Midnapore – that count tribal and OBC votes as the dominant factors.
The Jhargram seat is reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. BJP’s sitting MP from Jhargram, Kunar Hembram, quit the party and joined the Trinamool Congress days before the election. Another sitting BJP MP and Union minister Subhas Sarkar lost as the voters accused him of being an ‘absentee’ MP. Midnapore’s sitting MP Dilip Ghosh was shifted to a new seat and that created an intra-party conflict.
Coochbehar in North Bengal, where the sitting MP and Union minister Nisith Pramanik was defeated, has a sizable Rajbanshi population; a section of them are the Hindu refugee group from Bangladesh.
The Narendra Modi government implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) for the sake of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, which might have brought an electoral dividend for the party in at least five Lok Sabha seats. However, the party lost two of them, including Coochbehar. The senior leadership failed to assess the resentment among workers against Pramanik in Coochbehar.
‘Washing Machine’ Malfunction
“Washing machine was working overtime, so people washed them,” said the Facebook post of a senior BJP leader and RSS volunteer who held positions of the party’s block president in a south Bengal district. Multiple posts on social media and agitated expressions in public from some old BJP hands are now surfacing. The posts and statements inside and outside the party are not coming from workers whom the party’s leaders called “random”, but from senior leaders.
“Some corrupt leaders of Trinamool, some thieves joined the BJP. They were fielded as candidates in this election and last Assembly election. Many of them became MLAs, and some became MPs as well. They are not even aligned to our ideology. We have been fighting against such corruption for years now. What is the point of endangering our lives and our family’s lives? The central leadership were more inclined to listen to the turncoat leaders and not us. Isn’t it humiliation?” a senior BJP leader, who came from the RSS, told News18.
Social media is full of such grievances and accusations where party workers and leaders blamed the defectors.
“A traitor is always a traitor. Someone who leaves a party and joins another, then again quits the other and joins back the old one, only to jump ship again to be inducted into the other… The party rewards them by fielding him as candidates. These kinds of people are just mercenaries and devoid of ideology. Everyone is not a Himanta (Biswa Sarma) and every state is not Assam,” said another senior BJP leader.
Radar-less Opposition, Sandeshkhali a ‘Lost Cause’
Senior political analyst Biswanath Chakraborti said the BJP failed in strategising its political-electoral policies. The party did not rake up the land-grab issues though land is a very emotive subject for Bengali voters living in the state’s rural hinterland.
For context, both the Left Front and Trinamool Congress stormed to power in the state by ousting their predecessors through different kinds of land movements. For the Left Front, it was a land distribution movement, which was later hailed as historic land reforms in Bengal. For Mamata Banerjee, it was two anti-land acquisition movements — Singur and Nandigram. Both movements, combined, took her to the seat of power in Bengal.
The BJP failed in spearheading any such land-related movement though it had a chance in Sandeshkhali. Apart from the allegations of sexual assault, the villagers also started coming up with allegations of land-grab. The land issues had huge potential to spread across districts, said a source in the RSS.
“We communicated this to the senior leadership. We also told them that the land issues should be brought to the fore and it can be coupled with the allegations of sexual assault. We lost a huge opportunity in Sandeshkhali. The momentum was lost after a few days and the movement fizzled out. More so as the Trinamool Congress started releasing some alleged sting videos and we could not counter them with similar aggression,” he added.
In Basirhat, BJP’s Rekha Patra, one of the complainants of sexual assault in Sandeshkhali, was defeated by Trinamool’s Nurul Islam by 3.33 lakh votes. Patra managed to get a lead of around 8,000 votes in the Sandeshkhali Assembly segment. However, she trailed in the rest of the six segments. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, while addressing a press conference on June 4, announced that the BJP lost in the Sandeshkhali Assembly constituency as well. However, the final results showed otherwise.
CAA Triggered ‘Confusion and Chaos’
Chakraborti further explained how the BJP leaders failed to counter Mamata Banerjee’s anti-CAA campaign. “Her campaign triggered confusion and chaos. People were hesitant to even apply. The BJP leaders could not dispel such confusion,” he said.
Around two weeks after the notification of the CAA, News18 travelled to Bongaon, where the Matuas, the largest and most powerful Hindu refugee group, constitute around 70% of its electorate. The sitting MP, Shantanu Thakur, could not motivate the Matuas to apply for citizenship.
Thakur won his seat by around 73,000 votes, almost half of his winning margin in 2019. The party’s CAA story did not reach the ground as the votes of Matuas in Krishnagar, Rajbanshi’s in Coochbehar were split between Trinamool and BJP. The party lost in Krishnanagar and Coochbehar.