West Bengal: Opposition Able to Resist TMC Troublemakers; Headwinds Pose Challenge for CM

Kolkata: The Trinamool Congress is having to contend with several headwinds for the panchayat elections this time round, despite being the ruling party with attendant advantages and its proven penchant for violence and intimidation to prevent the Opposition from actively participating in the elections. Does it follow that the situation will be different from 2018 when TMC activists ensured that the party nominees cornered 34% of the seats without a contest by preventing Opposition candidates from filing nominations?

This phenomenon was most conspicuous in the Birbhum district where TMC strongman and a critical fundraiser Anubrata Mondal, who is now lodged in New Delhi’s Tihar jail as part of a smuggling-related investigative process, was able to see 90% of TMC candidates winning without a fight. Aiding TMC and its activists’ unchecked resort to violence and intimidation was the disorganised state of the Left and the Congress whose strength to be politically relevant was dented by TMC’s “resolve” to reduce them to signboard parties by causing defections and forcefully capturing their party offices.

If TMC and its supremo-cum-chief minister Mamata Banerjee are having to contend with headwinds for the July 8 three-tier panchayat elections (except in Darjeeling where it will have to be a two-tier exercise), a crucial reason is that the non-Bharatiya Janata Party Opposition has been able to overcome its severe organisational deficiencies to an appreciable extent and reach a functional understanding to fight the elections jointly. This, in turn, has given them the confidence to resist and that is evident since the announcement of the poll schedule on June 8.

The parties, individually and together have been over the past two years stepping up their political activity including mass contact drives, which have them groom youths for spearheading agitations on bread-and-butter issues. A number of student and youth leaders belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have already become prominent faces. The Congress, in a moribund state for long, has activated its frontal outfits which are seen organising street corner meetings and rallies.

The education department recruitment scam has brought to the fore several cases of huge amounts of money changing hands, investigative agencies slapping charges of smuggling against the Birbhum district party chief and inquiries against Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee and his wife and finally, rivalry among TMC’s influential district leaders over sharing the spoils of illegal activity have dented the image of the party in the past seven-eight months.

On the law and order front, the role of the police and intelligence gathering agencies has been found wanting rather frequently in the last 15 months or so and the chief minister, who herself holds charge of the home portfolio, has been publicly critical of their role. Yet, there is little improvement. With the image dented, intra-party rivalry has been on the increase and this is manifest in an increasing number of intra-party clashes. Of late, nomination for panchayat elections has become the bone of contention. Abhishek’s warnings about disciplinary action against recalcitrant elements are falling on deaf ears. [TMC’s utter failure to make a mark in Goa, Tripura and Meghalaya Assembly elections and the successive victory of the Congress in Himachal and Karnataka have too combined to subdue Mamata’s stance.]

Surprising though it may seem but it is a fact that despite incidents of violence and attempts to intimidate, the Opposition candidates, have succeeded in filing nominations and as on June 13, TMC was lagging behind. One reason is said to be the top brass’s decision to decide nominees centrally in Kolkata. This means taking away the responsibility from the district leadership, who often ignore fiats from the headquarters and see it as an opportunity to distribute favours to loyal people. It is also being speculated that as the distribution of tickets involves some monetary transactions, the top brass decided to handle the issue itself.

Compounding the discomfiture of the leadership at a time when the image has taken a beating are the headwinds. The Kudmis of the Purulia, Bankura, West Medinipur and Jhargram districts, which together constitute the Jungle Mahal region, have decided not to vote in favour of the ruling party nominees. The region has 42 of the state’s 294  Assembly constituencies and six of 42 Lok Sabha constituencies. They are a determining factor in at least 30 out of the 42 Assembly seats. A senior Kudmi leader Ajit Prasad Mahto told NewsClick: “Our demand for ST status, in place of the OBC categorisation thrust upon us for decades, has been pending for a long time and we have given enough anthropolitical evidence to back up our demand. We have organised agitations in support of our demand. Nothing has happened. Also, the state government had done precious little to lift the quality of life of Kudmis. There is no question of our voting for TMC nominees for the panchayat elections.”

The region, a Maoist hotbed for several years, has six of the state’s Lok Sabha seats. These are Bankura, Bishnupur, Jhargram, Midnaore, Ghatal, and Purulia. In elections, therefore, the region is crucial.

The second setback for TMC is in the Matua-dominated areas of the North 24 Parganas district which houses the Thakurbari and the revered Matua shrines. The dominant faction is led by BJP Lok Sabha member and a Union minister of state Shantanu Thakur, whose followers recently prevented Abhishek from fulfilling his engagements as part of his ‘resurgent Trinamool’ programme. He left the place with the threat that “he would face them after three months”.

In North Bengal, where Darjeeling will have two-tier panchayat polls after almost 23 years, TMC could not dent BJP’s base effectively and it is now left to fight the elections as a junior ally of Anit Thapa’s Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha, which is in control of the Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) and Darjeeling Municipality. Eight parties, including Bimal Gurung’s Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, have formed an alliance stitched by BJP’s Darjeeling Lok Sabha member Raju Bista. Then, as Saman Pathak, Darjeeling district CPI(M)’s secretary, told NewsClick the Left – predominantly his party, “an extended Left comprising small outfits” and the Congress will fight together. With this, Gurung will inch back, at least for now, towards BJP. [Because of GTA, the later avatar of Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, which is still mentioned in the Constitution, Darjeeling will have no Zila Parishad election.]

In the context of the widely condemned 2018 panchayat poll and the perceptible change in the political situation before the 2023 election, NewsClick asked senior political leaders to give their assessment. CPI(M) politburo member Ramchandra Dome, whose base is in the Birbhum district – known for several years as TMC strongman Anubrata Mondal’s stronghold – said, “It’s not a case of being cowed down this time round. Our cadres are resisting the intimidation and violence of TMC goons.”

“Things would have been better if we had some MPs and MLAs who could oversee the nomination filing process and raise the tempo. I have no hesitation in accepting that BJP, which with its MLAs and MP, have fared better in the filing of nominations,” Dome told NewsClick.

State Congress vice-president Hafiz Alam Sairani said Mamata and her party have singularly failed politically and administratively in organising violence-free elections. In her regime a culture has grown which has been encouraging elected members to believe that it is an opportunity to ‘make hay while the sun shines’ and this explains TMC cadres’ resort to intimidatory tactics, according to him. “But we are now able to thwart their game plan. An aiding factor is the severe group rivalry among TMC workers. There are signs of a re-think on the part of sections of Muslims, particularly youth. They see a ray of hope in the Left-Congress understanding, as a result of which they are willing to revisit their traditional support for TMC,” he told NewsClick.

General secretary of West Bengal Pradesh Kisan Sabha Ajit Mukherjee told NewsClick, “The fact that TMC is having to contend with several headwinds is by itself proof that the Opposition now is not as weak as it was in 2018. The record of the past four days suggests that the TMC top brass has lagged behind in the nomination filing race. It must be due to intra-party squabbles over candidacy and money matters,” Mukherjee observed.

For the record:

In West Bengal,

Zilla Parishad constituencies: 825, spread over 20 Zilla Parishads and one Mahakuma Parishad

Panchayat Samiti constituencies: 9,240 in 341 Panchayat Samitis

Gram Panchayat Constituencies: 48,751 in 3354 Gram Panchayats

[Source: West Bengal Election Commission]

The writer is a Kolkata-based senior freelance journalist. The views expressed are personal.