BJP insiders fear that the party could lose Raiganj and Cooch Behar this time. According to them, demographic changes in the two constituencies make the BJP candidates vulnerable.
Last Sunday brought a freak tornado to North Bengal, ripping out roofs from thatched houses, sending walls crashing down on hapless people, leaving five dead and rendering thousands homeless. It brought in its wake Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who toured the devastated sites and announced that she would stay put in the region.
Though she said she would stay to supervise the relief work, she has devoted her time to reaching out to people, talking to tea garden workers and villagers in road-side tea stalls as a part of her Lok Sabha campaign.
At stake are the seats of Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri which go to the polls in the first phase on 19 April and those of Darjeeling, Raiganj and Balurghat which vote on 26 April. After all this is the region which has repeatedly rebuffed her Trinamool Congress and has been a Bharatiya Janata Party citadel for long. Banerjee’s aim is to breach that citadel this time.
Mamata Banerjee was supposed to start her visit on 4 April, and had rallies at Cooch Behar and Alipurduar lined up. The tornado gave her the opportunity to advance her campaign. Trinamool Congress leaders say she wanted to get some mileage before Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the BJP’s campaign in Cooch Behar on 4 April. She has announced that she will stay in North Bengal till 17 April and will only visit Kolkata for two days to celebrate Iftar and Id with her “Muslim brothers and sisters” and for Poila Baisakh to pay obeisance at the Kalighat temple.
North Bengal has become a BJP “stronghold” gradually since the Gorkhaland agitation of the 1980s. For instance, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Raju Bista of the BJP won Darjeeling with a 59% vote share. Similarly, Jayanto Roy won Jalpaiguri with a 51% vote share and Nisith Pramanik won Cooch Behar with a 48% vote share. In Alipurduar, John Barla won with a 54% vote share. The BJP won even Raiganj, though with a lower vote share of 40%.
In 2019, the BJP won seven of the eight Parliamentary constituencies across the northern districts of West Bengal but the Trinamool Congress improved its performance in the 2021 Assembly polls.
The BJP state president, Sukanta Majumdar, who is seeking re-election from Balurghat constituency is confident that his party will be able to replicate its 2019 mammoth performance in north Bengal. “Those who think that the Trinamool Congress has penetrated deep enough to shake the saffron stronghold will be proved wrong on 4 June,” he told The Sunday Guardian.
“She is like that tornado sweeping through North Bengal,” said Santu Pramanik, a local Trinamool Congress leader who belongs to the Rajbongshi community of Cooch Behar. He is confident that the Trinamool Congress will win big in north Bengal this time.
Cooch Behar, which was once a stronghold of Forward Bloc, was won by the Trinamool Congress in 2014 and by the BJP in 2019. The sitting MP Nisith Pramanik is also the Union Minister of State for Home in the Narendra Modi government.
Cooch Behar constituency, which recently saw clashes between supporters of Pramanik and Trinamool Congress leader and Minister Udayan Guha, has become a battleground of prestige, with both parties leaving no stone unturned to secure victory.
Up north in Darjeeling, the situation is a bit tricky for the BJP as Bishnu Prasad Sharma, the saffron MLA from Kurseong is contesting as an Independent candidate after he was denied the Lok Sabha ticket despite initial promises.
In Alipurduar, sitting BJP MP and Union Minister of State in the Ministry of Minority Affairs John Barla, who had won with a margin of 2.4 lakh votes last time, was denied a ticket by the party citing performance. An aggrieved Barla, a minority community leader holding sway with the local tribes, has so far stayed away from campaigns alleging a conspiracy to keep him out.
The saffron party has also shifted its Raiganj MP Debasree Chaudhury, a former Union Minister, to Kolkata South following objections from a section of the district and state leaders. A few months ago, Krishna Kalyani, the BJP MLA from Raiganj, shifted to the Trinamool Congress claiming a conspiracy hatched by Debasree Chaudhury. The Trinamool Congress has now given the ticket to Kalyani for the Lok Sabha elections.
BJP insiders fear that the party could lose Raiganj and Cooch Behar this time. According to them, demographic changes in the two constituencies make the BJP candidates vulnerable. According to psephologist and professor of political science of Rabindra Bharati University, Biswanath Chakraborty: “The BJP has to cash in on the tremendous resentment of the locals against Rohingya Muslims, whose settlement the Trinamool Congress has facilitated in the region.”
“The locals have learnt to live with immigrants from Bangladesh. After all, they are culturally Indian and most have integrated. In any case, they have been coming for the last six decades or so. But the people in North Bengal are not willing to accept Rohingya Muslims. They are completely ‘un-Indian’ and alien. In the 2024 elections, this will be an issue. Just as CAA and NRC will be in not just the North, but in the whole of Bengal,” he adds.
With the Rajbongshi community vote share standing at around 37-40% and the Matua community voters at around 27%, and with the BJP enjoying the support of both the communities across the state, the advantage is on the side of the BJP, say observers.
“I think the BJP could have done better if they had focused on the undemocratic nature of the TMC and not on the CAA,” says Biswanath Chakraborty.
Another worry is the vicious infighting within the party, and its total failure to strengthen its political organisation from the grassroots, say observers.
The Dhupguri Assembly byelection last year had exposed the BJP’s weakening hold. The bypoll was crucial to both the BJP and the Trinamool ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. For the BJP, it would have been a chance to stem its inexorable decline in the state since the 2021 Assembly elections, and for the Trinamool, it was an opportunity to strike a telling blow in the saffron party’s stronghold of north Bengal, where it won six of its 18 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 elections.
However, Dhupguri is the third Assembly constituency, after Dinhata and Santipur, that the BJP lost control of in byelections after the 2021 Assembly elections, in which it had won 77 out of 294 seats. In what was perceived as a “prestige fight” between the ruling party and the main Opposition, Trinamool’s Nirmal Chandra Roy edged past the BJP’s Tapasi Roy by 4,309 votes.
The stakes are very high for both the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party in North Bengal. While Mamata Banerjee has vowed to make a clean sweep of the 42 constituencies in the state to emerge as a power behind the throne in Delhi, BJP president Amit Shah has set a target of 35 seats in Bengal.