In spite of the BJP paid media hype, BJP was no match for Mamata Banerjee’s juggernaut.
How
did Didi manage this feat? When we look back; we find that 2021
Assembly elections in West Bengal were bitterly fought. The Bharatiya Janata
Party marshaled all its resources, pumping in huge sums of money, bringing in
national leaders, influencing election arrangements, and getting large sections
of the national media to portray it as the favorite. Moreover, with the
help of the then shameless CEC- Mr. Sunil Arora, BJP played every dirty trick
to ousted Mamata Banerjee.
In the end, it all came to naught. The BJP
fell well short of victory. The Trinamool Congress swept the state, winning 48%
of the vote and 73% of seats – its best performance ever*.
Professor of economics at the London School of Economics – Dr. Maitreesh Ghatak; had opined that welfare web Mamata Banerjee is in fact so vast that it has pushed the growth rate of the state’s rural per capita consumption expenditure as well as poverty reduction past the national average.
The
Bhadua and Dalal Media like (Republic, ABP, TVToday, TV18, IndiaTV, Zee, and
TV9 etc) were bought and engaged by BJP to create an anti-incumbency wave against
TMC.
Several
prostitute journalists like Anjana Om Kashyap, Sweeta Singh, Chitra Tripathi,
Rubika Liyaqat, Sumaira Khan,Navika Kumar,Minakshi Dev,Moupia Nandi were
engaged to slander and smear Mamata Banerjee.
Similarly, several gigolos like Arnab Goswami, Suman De, Sumit Awasthi, Rahul Kanwal,
Rajdeep Sardesai ,Amish Devgan, Anand Narsimhan, Rajat Sharma, Sudhir Chaudhury,
Deepak Chowrasia was affianced to malign and slur Mamata Banerjee with all
false allegations.
They all portrayed “cut-money” or bribery, caste and communal polarisation factors ; but eventually that all were proven futile against “Mamata Didi”. So while there was anger, what was often missed is that the Trinamool Congress had far more people happy with its welfare than not. In effect, pro-incumbency trumped anti-incumbency.
Magmata’s
Vast Cash-Transfer Welfare Scheme –
This was, by some distance, the single biggest factor driving votes to the
Trinamool. The Trinamool has since it came to power in 2011, turbocharged
welfare in the state. This includes, amongst other things, regular cash transfers
to girls, if they do not get married and remain in school, a grant once they do
get married, and unemployment dole for young citizens, scholarships for Dalits
and minorities, a handout to cover funeral costs and payments to farmers
(including compensation on death), pensions for old age and widows: you name a
problem and Banerjee has a cash transfer ready for it.
Formidable Party Organisation –
The Muslim vote -
With
a Muslim percentage in West Bengal more than double the national average, the
Muslim vote was always going to be a huge advantage for the Trinamool if the
community consolidated behind it. And by corollary, this would be a huge
disadvantage for the BJP. Bengal’s Muslims were alarmed by the BJP’s
promise of a communal citizenship test or National Register of Citizens aimed
exclusively at them. Thus, Muslim vote had been transferred en masse to
the Trinamool Congress.
The Women’s vote -
If Muslims are a big population, with a quarter of Bengal, women are straight up half. This significant lead in female vote share, therefore, brings in a massive dividend in terms of votes for the Trinamool. Unsurprisingly, Mamata Banerjee has sharply concentrated on wooing women using welfare, with a host of schemes designed to directly transfer cash to female hands. In return, clearly, those hands have chosen the Trinamool’s twin-flower on the EVM machine.
Mamata Didi’s Image as a Charismatic Leader -
Mamata Banerjee is the tallest leader in the state is a fact beyond any doubt. While this assumed very large proportions in Bengal due to Banerjee’s persona, this issue has bedeviled the BJP in every state since it came to power in New Delhi in 2014. The party’s performance has always lagged behind in Assembly elections compared to its performance in Lok Sabha polls. BJP’s poaching attitude to buying other party MLA had created a bad precedence to the people of West Bengal. Mamata Didi was successful in implanting that apprehension to the common voters during her election campaign, people of West Bengal were impressed on it.
The Trinamool, by and large,
did not have an ideological core till very recently. However, it was forced to
change when confronted with the BJP – a party with possibly the strongest
ideological core of any in India. To counter the party’s Hindu nationalism, the
Bengal-based Trinamool reached for an obvious choice: Bengali nationalism. In
2021, the Trinamool painted itself as a nativist force while the BJP was a party
of bohiragotos (outsiders) and Borgis (as people in the state remember the Maratha
Raiders led a destructive invasion of Bengal in the 18th century). Much of this actually had little effect on the ground
found. Nationalisms take decades to be “imagined” bottom-up. But it did
provide the Trinamool a coherent media narrative when taking on the BJP’s
Hindutva. This worked so well that at one point, Amit Shah was even forced to
clarify that a Gujarati would not form the government in Bengal but that it
would consist of Bengalis.
BJP’s Covid Mismanagement -
The Election Commission decided on an eight-phase election in West Bengal – the longest state polls in India’s history. Much of this was seen as helping the BJP, given it would allow extensive deployment of Central paramilitary troops in order to cancel, to some extent, the Trinamool’s organizational advantage. However, things did not pan out exactly as planned. From mid-March, Covid-19 cases started rising exponentially in India as it headed into its second wave – the deadliest corona virus outbreak in the world. In spite of this, Modi and Shah continued to spend much of their time canvassing in West Bengal rather than fulfill their duty to manage collapsing health systems in places like Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. This had a negative effect on both the image of Modi as a selfless leader as well as the BJP as a party of development. Even worse was when Modi and Shah stopped campaigning. The fledgling BJP Bengal unit needed the central unit of the party. This is why Modi-Shah had taken such a huge political risk in continuing to campaign even as cases raged in Delhi. Without them, the BJP campaign was badly hit. Even worse, the Trinamool took advantage of the chaos in the BJP to press home its organizational advantage, violently disturbing the vote in many locations in the final phase as part of its strategy of “khela hobe” – game on. Unsurprisingly, the Trinamool has performed excellently in the last two phases.
Recently concluded West Bengal Assembly election had opened up several possibilities, it also exposed the corruption and unholy nexus in Election Mechanism (The shameless dishonest ECI like Sunil Arora – did all sorts of nonsense to favor BJP at the cost of common people; the emergence of the second Covid wave would not have occurred, if he would not have been the puppet of BJP. As per the normal election norm (A contesting candidate should engage his/her election agent from the same place constituency; but he amended that provision, he even allowed BJP hired goons from Bihar-UP-Jharkhand-Gujarat to act as election agent to support BJP), His ignorance and naked support to BJP (ignoring the covid restriction guideline) had been the reason for mass-scale covid death during the second wave. Since then Mr. Sunil Arora had been named as executioner.
The acting Chief Justice of Kolkata High Court (Rajesh Bindol), did everything to woo BJP during the election. As a shameless corrupt judge, he took all sorts of measures to defame Mamata Banerjee and entices BJP.
The idiot governor of West Bengal ( Jagdeep Dhankar – a tainted personality in the Jain Hawala case) rose up openly to support the BJP party. Despite hearing multiple sullied remarks and slurs by the BJP leaders like Subhendu, Dilip, Rahul, Sayantan, Samik, Nishith, and even from Modi ( infamous “Didi –O-Didi), he kept silent. Both BJP appointed governors duo “Tathagata Roy” and “Jagdeep Dhankar” were proven the most corrupt and sly governors of India, who openly encourage “MLA Poaching”. Both of them are now named as “Barefaced BJP Cadre”.
People of West Bengal could not tolerate such vicious unholy nexus planned by BJP (with money-muscle-judiciary-media power).
Juggernaut of Mamata Banerjee is now widely in evidence all across.
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