Mamata Banerjee, for the last 15 years that she has helmed Bengal, has triumphed against all political odds in successive poll battles.
Ten years ago, the Trinamool chief went to polls under the cloud of the multi-crore chit-fund scam and a bribery sting called the Saradha-Narada controversy. She came out unscathed, improving her party’s tally by 27 seats against the 184 that had brought her to the chief minister’s chair in 2011, the year Bengal last saw poriborton (change).
Five years after that in 2021, the list of corruption charges grew longer and anti-incumbency also grew. The BJP, by then the de facto main Opposition, slammed hard and engineered mass defections from the ruling party.
An injured Mamata ran the 2021 election campaign winning 215 seats on a trump card – the women’s dole called Lakshmir Bhandar – which helped her tide over the BJP’s challenge, reduce the other political rivals to zero, and secure her highest number of seats ever.
Seen against such tough battles of the past, all should have been hunky dory for Mamata and the ruling Trinamool in the run up to the Bengal Assembly election scheduled for later this month. On the surface the Trinamool has kept a brave face, but under the layers a section of the party betrays jitters.
Is this the most difficult election that Mamata has ever faced?
A number of Trinamool leaders, some of whom are candidates in this month’s election, expressed “concern” over the party’s tally in private.
“Chaap aachhe [There is pressure]. Achieving the target of 226 seems difficult,” said a Trinamool nominee, who did not want to be named for obvious reasons.
Just about a fortnight is left before Bengal goes to polls in the first phase of the Assembly elections. On April 23, an ‘X’ percentage of the 35,97,704 electors marked under adjudication in 152 of the Assembly seats will be left out. No one knows what this X equals; there is still no clarity how many voters will be left out.
These voters are not the only ones worried about their fate as electors. Also worried is the Trinamool rank and file.
Mamata’s impregnable fortress is built on the foundation of voters; the Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls hits that very foundation.
Of the 60.06 lakh voters marked under adjudication, 57 lakh cases had been disposed of by April 5, according to sources in the poll panel. The deadline for updating the electoral rolls for the first phase is April 6.
The fate of a section of these 35,97,704 lakh voters is heavily linked to the Trinamool’s electoral fortunes.
How skewed the SIR process is can be assessed from the fact that the number of voters marked under adjudication in one constituency in Muslim-majority North Dinajpur’s Goalpokhor is more than the combined figures of Bankura and Purulia, both with a sizeable tribal population.
In Goalpokhor 78,475 voters are under adjudication; in Bankura-Purulia taken together, that figure comes to 72,694.
Partha Bhowmick, Trinamool’s Lok Sabha MP from Barrackpore who has participated in several meetings with the poll panel in Calcutta, says his party is fighting the election against the Election Commission.
“If some people say there is pressure, it is because of the EC. There is no opposition party on the ground. We are fighting against the commission,” Bhowmick told The Telegraph Online.
Chandrima Bhattacharya, the junior minister for finance (independent charge) in the incumbent government and Trinamool nominee from Dum Dum North, echoed it.
“People of Bengal have always kept faith in Mamata di and they will do the same this time. Though the Centre through the commission is trying to make it impossible for the people to exercise their right to vote, the people of Bengal will elect Mamata di as chief minister for the fourth time,” Bhattacharya said.
Bengal is in a way the last frontier on the eastern side of India’s map that has eluded Narendra Modi and Amit Shah since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014. In these 12 years, the BJP has painted most of the country saffron, with Bengal remaining the final frontier in the east, and two states in the south, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, also out of its reach.
All the three states will go to polls later this month.
Bengal’s incumbent chief minister has set a target of 226 seats, 11 more than the Trinamool’s tally in the last Assembly elections held in 2021. The party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee has time and again said the Trinamool will return to power, even if with one seat more than the last polls.
The messaging from the two top leaders is targeted at the Trinamool footsoldiers.
The arithmetic seems stacked against the Trinamool.
In 2021 there were 55 seats which Mamata’s party won with a victory margin of less than 15,000. In 39 of these seats the margin was less than 10,000, with the lowest recorded in West Midnapore’s Dantan.
Hypothetically, a swing against the Trinamool in any of these 55 constituencies brings the party’s tally to 170, comfortable enough to form a government.
The corresponding figures of Assembly segments that the Trinamool won by a margin of less than 15,000 in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls rose to 69.
Among the segments where the victory margin was less than 10,000 are Mamata’s own constituency, Bhabanipur, neighbouring Rasbehari and Maniktala in Calcutta, Cossipore-Belgachhia in the north of the city and Rajarhat-Gopalpur adjacent to the city, where the margin was a mere 74 votes.
In three other Assembly segments in north Calcutta, the BJP was ahead in Jorasanko, Shyampukur and Maniktala.
In this scenario a swing against the Trinamool could bring down the seats to 146, one short of the midway mark.
“Even if there are large-scale deletions in the seats where Trinamool had won by a margin of 50,000 to 1 lakh, the margin in those seats may come down, but Trinamool will win,” said a Trinamool watcher.
“There are 52 seats in the Muslim belt spread over North Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad and Birbhum [all vote in the first phase]. Trinamool is definitely going to retain a majority of these seats. Likewise, in South 24-Parganas, North 24-Parganas and Howrah, there is not a single Opposition MLA in South 24-Parganas that is likely to change. North Bengal remains the Achilles heel for the Trinamool,” the political analyst added.
A Trinamool insider said the party leaders and workers are burning the midnight oil to make the appeals process for deleted voters smooth.
“Abhishek Banerjee is busy with the SIR appeals process till late into midnight every day after campaigning,” said a Trinamool source. “Except for one complaint in Panihati against a poll official, others are being ignored. The attack is multi-pronged. We could have done a lot more if we didn’t have to spend half our resources against the commission.”
The BJP’s narrative this poll season has been consistent with what it was in the 2021 elections – the party is coming to power and will end the “misrule” of the Trinamool.
A section of the Trinamool concedes that even 100 seats for the BJP would mean trouble for the state.
Despite the heavy odds, the Trinamool insists the outcome of the battle for Bengal will have ramifications far beyond the boundaries of the state.
“A pounding to the BJP in Bengal in 2026 will pave the way to finish what was left unfinished in 2024,” said a Trinamool insider. “This fight will not end on May 4, but in 2029” when the next Lok Sabha polls are scheduled, the insider added.