TMC MAINTAINS WINNING SPREE, BUT MUST NOT IGNORE LEFT’S RE-EMERGENCE

The recently held Ballygunge Assembly and the Lok Sabha bypolls in Asansol may have depicted the unabated TMC raj in West Bengal but on the other hand, the Left forces have re-emerged especially in the Ballygunge seat and have pushed the BJP to the third position! It may be recalled that if late Subrata Mukherjee had won the Ballygunge seat by a massive (more than) 70,000 votes in 2021, Babul Supriyo who defected from BJP to TMC won the seat this time by a little over 20,000 votes! The TMC, obviously, has to keep the reduced margin in mind and go back to the storyboard to find the lacunae for which the victory margin had dipped so much.

WHY THE LEFT RE-EMERGED? Following the results in Ballygunge, CPI(M) is asserting that it is the only alternative to the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The CPI(M)-led Left Front, which could not win a single seat in the 2021 assembly elections in the state, sees a glimmer of hope in the results of the recent elections in the state, be it for municipalities or assembly bypolls, wherein many places it came second, leaving the BJP behind. “An idea that the Left has become irrelevant in West Bengal politics was doing the rounds. People are slowly realising that functionally Left is the only alternative to the present regime in West Bengal,” Chakraborty had told the media. BJP, which had won 77 seats in the assembly elections, is the only opposition party having representation in the House. “People are realising that in real sense what is meant by opposition on issues of employment, law and order, etc is shown by the Left,” he said, adding that this was, however, not being reflected in the electoral process.

The Left Front was runner-up to the TMC in 65 wards in the 144-ward Kolkata Municipal Corporation election held in December last year in which the TMC recorded a landslide victory. The #NoVoteToBabul campaign, which drew on Supriyo’s previous stand and was led by some pressure groups in the city, evidently gathered steam to the extent that protestors were arrested. A cursory glance at the break-up of poll figures from the seven municipal wards of the constituency reveals that Supriyo never succeeded in gaining the voters’ trust in full. In two of those seven wards, ward numbers 64 and 65, the CPIM’s Saira Shah Halim garnered more votes than the Trinamool. That, coupled with the dip in voter turnout by a staggering 20%, is proof that a large number of voters stayed away from making a choice.

The Ballygunge bypoll experience could be a fallout of any of the possibilities stated above or a mix and match of all. But for the ruling Trinamool Congress dispensation in Bengal, it’s certainly a warning bell that merits introspection into steps it needs to take to shake off the socalled “voters’ dilemma” before it makes its big push for 2024 general elections. Also as far as the electorate count in Ballygunge goes, the Muslim voters constitute a figure of 51% of the total voter count. And to top it all, the Left candidate was also a Muslim, Saira Shah Halim who is also the niece of veteran thespian Naseeruddin Shah who had, in a video message, promoted her candidature. From just 5.61 per cent of the vote share in Ballygunge in 2021 assembly elections, the CPI(M) candidate notched up over 30 per cent of the votes polled in the by-election, leaving behind the BJP, to come up to the second position.

The CPI(M) last won from the Ballygunge seat in south Kolkata in 2001 and secured the third position behind TMC and BJP in the 2021 elections. Having said that, we also need to mention how since inception, the TMC which never won the Asansol seat has managed to wrest it this time with full honours. Shatrughan Sinha defeated BJP’s Agnimitra Paul by a whopping 3 lakh votes. The TMC bagged 56.62 per cent of the votes polled, while the BJP got 30.46 per cent votes. The by-poll saw a huge swing of 21 per cent votes in favour of the TMC from the saffron camp’s kitty. “The results are a testimony that I am no less a Bengali than any other Bengali. I am not an outsider. I am happy to win Asansol for the TMC, which it had never won before,” Sinha told reporters.

What makes the victory margin more credible is that it happened despite a lower voter turnout of 66.42 per cent compared to 76.62 per cent in 2019. Sinha garnered 6,56,358 votes against BJP’s Agnimitra Paul’s 3,53,149 votes. Paul generously accepted that there was no rigging and that the party needs to “introspect and strategise ahead for the 2024 general elections.” However, former West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh alleged that TMC had unleashed a campaign of terror in the run up to the elections. Political analyst Biswanath Chakraborty feels that the Ballygunge results have shown that a section of minorities who voted for the TMC last year switched to the CPI(M). However, others pointed out that this theory does not explain the huge reduction in vote share for the BJP.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL