Bengal Assembly elections: Not just Muslims, Scheduled Castes too hold key to TMC's prospects

While BJP’s campaign of Bengal is based on painting Mamta Banerjee as “anti-Hindu”. A close scrutiny of the 2016 Assembly election results of districts with large Muslim population, however, shows that Mamta Banerjee was not the preferred choice for the minority voters of Bengal. Instead, the community supported the Congress-CPM combine in a big way. As much as 56 seats out of the 70 seats won by CPM-Congress in 2016 are from districts where Muslim Population is more than 25 percent. More specifically, in the three districts of Murshidabad, Malda and North Dinajpur, which have 50 percent or more Muslim population, the CPM-Congress combine won 31 seats out of 43. The TMC, on the other hand, managed to win only eight seats. One can argue that Congress is traditionally strong in these areas, but that unto itself indicates that minority voters prefer Congress. Perhaps the memories of Mamata’s alliance with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA have not faded from the public memory. The entire narrative painted by the BJP and its supporters that the “Hindu Dharma” would face danger in West Bengal if Mamta returns to power because of her extreme pro-Muslim stance is not substantiated by the data of the 2016 Assembly election result. There are eleven districts in which the Muslim population is less than 21 percent, which means Muslim support alone would not make any party win the election. However, an analysis of election results shows that out of the 116 assembly seats in these Districts, the TMC won 89 Assembly seats, virtually sweeping every district except Darjeeling where the TMC failed to win any of the six seats because of its opposition to the demand for Gorkha Land. The Scheduled Caste voters While most election analysts are focused on Muslim voters and their likely influence in the 2021 Assembly elections results, the Scheduled Castes (SCs) are equally important in West Bengal as the community constitutes 23 percent of the state’s population. This puts them on the second spot just after Muslims whose population is 28 percent in West Bengal. There are as many as six districts in West Bengal where SCs account for more than 25% of the population. Together, these districts account for 127 Assembly seats. Besides, there are six districts with 78 Assembly seats where the SCs constitute 15-25 percent of the population. The BJP’s focus is very much on the SC vote bank and is exploiting the community’s socio-economic tensions with Muslims to consolidate them. The party’s outreach to the Matua community, which has mostly migrated from East Bengal, and lives in the international border districts, is part of this strategy. 2019 Lok Sabha election in Bengal: A new voting pattern emerges The BJP had not contested the 2016 Assembly election much with as much vigour as the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. In 2016, the party won only three seats in the Assembly election, but its vote share was a significant 10.16 percent, whereas the Congress-CPM combine had bagged 32 percent votes together. The TMC was a clear winner with a 45 percent vote share. It is intriguing to note that in the 2019 Loksabha election the BJP’s vote share rose to 40.7 percent, whereas the TMC still managed to get 43.3 percent of total votes. The Congress and CPM, which contested the polls separately, got 4 percent and 16 percent votes, respectively. A major shift in the voting pattern was noticed in all the segments in the 2019 election. While a sizeable chunk of Hindu Bengali voters shifted from the TMC to the BJP, the minority voters compensated for it. The minority community adopted tactical voting and voted in favour of the TMC in areas where it found that Congress contesting alone was unlikely to win. This led to the BJP’s victories in all the northern seats from Alipur Duar to Malda Uttar, including Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling and Balurghat besides the eastern seats like Jhargram, Medinipur, Purulia, Bankura, Asansol, Durgapur-Bardhaman and Hooghly where minority voters are mostly less than 20 percent. That polarisation helps BJP immensely in seats where the Muslim population is less than 20 percent is a proven fact right from Gujarat. In such seats, Muslims are large enough to be demonised but not enough to influence the election result. BJP’s win in Cooch Bihar, Barrackpore, Ranaghat, and Bangaon is more significant, as, in all such seats the Muslim population is more than 20 percent and yet the saffron party emerged victorious. This has a lot to do with the defection of the Matua voters from the TMC to the BJP, whereas the victory of the BJP in Raiganj was largely due to a triangular fight where the Congress cut through the minority votes as well. The BJP has been aggressively wooing the Matua, a Scheduled Caste community, along with others who fall in the SC category. In fact, the strategy of the BJP is to put the SCs against the Muslims as they constitute 23 percent of the total population. The TMC leadership, like the CPM of the past, has always been in the hands of Brahmins and members of upper castes. Though Mamata has broken away from this traditional thinking and become a real mass leader in the last 20 years, it is still to be seen how she would strike a balance between all the social groups from whom she intends to get support to win the election of a lifetime. The BJP’s victory in 18 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 from just two in 2014, put the BJP within a striking distance of the seat of power in West Bengal. However, at the same time, the said result has the capacity to further realign the voters especially Muslim voters who are now seeing the possibility of a BJP government in West Bengal, to adopt tactical voting more minutely than in 2019. The results would again be in the TMC’s favour provided the ruling party in the state also manages to hold on to a sizeable chunk of the SC voters as well. The SCs are the same vote bank that had migrated decisively from the CPM to the TMC in 2011 and to a large extent remained with it in 2016. The TMC’s ability to hold on to this vote bank will decide the outcome of the 2021 polls. In the 2019 Loksabha election, the BJP won the Parliamentary seats in many of these areas, however, the context of the Lok Sabha elections and Vidhan Sabha elections are entirely different. The lack of an acceptable chief ministerial face is one area where the BJP lacks heavily and despite a 10-year rule and possible anti-incumbency, it’s Mamta Banerjee who is considered to be the most preferred candidate for chief minister in all pre-poll surveys with more than 50 percent rating. Any rating of more than 60 percent denotes a sure shot winner, however, any rating between 50 percent to 60 percent gives an edge to the incumbent chief minister over its rivals. The voting will commence in four days from now on and will take more than a month to end. It would be interesting to see who consolidates or who starts slipping in this election. Any good showing by the CPM-Congress alliance would help the BJP, a party that is a master of triangular contests. The AIMIM of Owaisi may also dent some of the TMC’s prospects, but this could be blessings in disguise as well since Mamta Banerjee would surely use strong words against him and this will dilute the BJP’s campaign of her being “anti-Hindu”. In a nutshell, khela hobe (the game is on).