BJP lands in Bengal: Can a hundred lotuses bloom?

There’s an old proverb that one swallow does not a summer make.

But in Bengal the BJP is counting on Mao Zedong and hoping that one lotus in Basirhat South will let at least a hundred lotuses bloom across the state in the next Assembly election in 2016.

The newly-minted BJP MLA from Basirhat South is oozing confidence.

“Basirhat has sent me to check out the Assembly,” says Samik Bhattacharya. “After all I will be coming with many more of us in 2016. We need to figure out who will sit where.”

The BJP has reason to feel chuffed. Its last (and only) MLA in West Bengal was way back in 1999. At that time Badal Bhattacharya had won from Ashoknagar - ironically with Trinamool support. Mamata Banerjee was part of the NDA government in Delhi then.

Bhattacharya alleges the ruling Left Front was less than bhadralok when it came to dealing with him.

The chief mininster Jyoti Basu, he tells The Telegraph , sometimes called him a Hanuman and a Bajrang Dal representative. Now the BJP can boast it has set Bengal’s ruling establishment’s tail on fire.

As for the CPM, it lost its deposit in Basirhat, a seat that had been its stronghold since 1977 as well as in Chowringhee which houses the party’s headquarters.

“Perhaps the Left was in the ICU, not it might be time to write a death certificate,” says academic Bimal Shankar Nanda on an ABP Ananda panel discussion.

Mamata had worked mightily to try and gut the CPM’s strong party infrastructure in Bengal. But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. “As I’ve argued before saffron is the new red,” says Praskanva Sinharay, a Ph.D. scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

The BJP claims that in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and afterwards, droves of voters in Bengal, including Bengali Muslims have been joining the party. They have also been wooing some celebrities and quasi-celebrities – singer Arati Mukherjee, Trinamool MP’s Derek O’Brien’s brother Barry – to counter Mamata’s culture wagon.

Basirhat, for them is their beachhead into Bengal in the way Ashoknagar in 1999 could not be. At that time they needed Mamata’s blessings. Now they want to replace Mamata.

Trinamool says it won’t be so easy. During the Modi wave, BJP led Basirhat South by 32,000 votes. That margin shrank to less than 1,600 votes in the by-election. In Chowringhee, though BJP sent in Amit Shah to campaign, Trinamool actually increased its vote share. “All in all, there is now only a battle for the opposition space in Bengal,” writes Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien. “The 2016 West Bengal election has only one frontrunner: Trinamool.”

He is 100 percent correct. Technically the biggest losers in Bengal were the CPM and Congress. But it is also correct that in 2011 few would have foreseen that in 2016 the biggest challenge to Trinamool might be posed by a party long regarded as an also-ran in West Bengal.

That changes politics dramatically as it technically becomes non-Left dominated though Mamata can defy ideology. There are already bloody fights between Trinamool and BJP supporters in several parts of the state.

The BJP has campaigned on two major fronts against Mamata and both will be ratcheted up.

Saradha Sting: Amit Shah dared to come to Kolkata and raise the slogan gali gali mein shor hain, Mamata Banerjee chor hain. No one in the Congress or CPM had the guts to take the fight right to the heart of Mamata’s personal credibility before. With the CBI camped out in Bengal, the Saradha drumbeat is growing louder. Trinamool is relieved it didn’t hurt it in Chowringhee, but Chandan Mitra, former BJP candidate from Hooghly, says confidently “As Saradha unravels it will take Mamata with it.”

Minorities Mollycoddling: There’s an internet canard that mocks Mamata as Mumtaz Begum for her vociferous Muslim outreach. Before the elections, a BJP party official wondered why Mamata was so busy offering stipends for imams and muezzins as if there were no poor Hindu priests. The allegations that Saradha money helped fund Jamaat-e-Islami activities in Bangladesh in return for help with the Muslim votes for Trinamool in Bengal surfaced right before the elections. The popular wisdom has been BJP has no chance in Bengal with its 28% Muslim vote but as Nanda points out on ABP Ananda “That might be true of the state but it’s not true of every constituency.”

Sinharay shares a story about a subtle shift underway in Bengal. Basirhat is known for its Matua community , an early 19th century religious reformation movement from Faridpur in Bangladesh which included low-caste Hindus and even Muslims and Christians. The Matuas catapulted into the headlines when Narendra Modi brought up the issue of citizenship rights for them prompting an angry outburst from Mamata. The Matuas have traditionally had a fair called the Barunimela named after a god in their cosmology. A few years ago it changed its name to Matua Dharma Mahamela. BJP volunteers, not too happy with that Matua self-assertion, set up booths there trying to underline the message that the Matuas were a Hindu minority and the BJP would be its saviour says Sinharay.

But the Basirhat victory also exposes some chinks in the BJP’s armour. It does not have enough party machinery yet in the rural areas. Trinamool led the BJP all through counting until the results from the towns of Basirhat and Taki started coming in. “In rural Bengal, the CPI(M) or the Left Front was the chief mediator and Trinamool has tried to replace it," says Sinharay. “But in the urban and semi-urban areas there is now clearly an alternative choice in the BJP.”

Also Basirhat is a border constituency and the temper of its politics is very different from the rest of Bengal.As is industrial Asansol with a strong Bihari population where Babul Supriyo wrested a Lok Sabha seat. Immigration is a hugely emotive issue in Basirhat. “Communal divisions were extreme during the late 40s. Bizarrely it was resolved by Bengal getting divided. Bengal bled enormously. We do not want to play that game again,” says Ranabir Samaddar, director of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group in an interview before the Lok Sabha elections. “Refugees, particularly middle-class refugees are the carriers of communal politics. But migration does not arouse frenzy around the rest of Bengal though it might be worked as a political tactic during elections.”

Translation: What Basirhat-on-the-border thinks today, the rest of Bengal does not necessarily think tomorrow.

But Chandan Mitra dismisses that argument. “These seats have always been border seats. But have never been able to convert our votes into seats. That’s why this one seat is a giant leap for BJP. It’s a game-changer.”

And the BJP is thrilled it happened without needing to piggyback on a Modi wave and despite Mamata deploying a phalanx of her top ministers and movie stars making Basirhat a prestige issue.

Samik Bhattacharya will have his work cut out for him being the BJP’s lone stormy petrel in the rambunctious Bengal assembly. His predecessor Badal Bhattacharya at least got a little tea and sympathy from then comrade-in-alliance Trinamool MLAs. Samik-babu will not be that fortunate.

But then as Tagore himself sang Jodi tor daak shuney keu naa aashey tobey ekla chalo re. (If no one hears your call then go it alone.)

Didi loves that song. At her Bengal Leads summit in Haldia in 2013 she got an industrialist to sing it on stage.

She could not have imagined then that a year later the BJP would be singing it, to her chagrin, in her own backyard.