The Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s December 19-20 trip to West Bengal was somewhat overshadowed by two unusual developments just before and after it.
Though Shah, during his tour managed to woo 13 MLAs, former legislators and an MP – mostly of the ruling Trinamool Congress – on the first day of his tour, a TMC MLA late on December 18 night announced that he was returning to the party which he had left just a day earlier.
The concerned MLA is Jitendra Tiwari, mayor of Asansol, who had only on December 17 evening left the party and was expected to join the BJP in the presence of Shah.
Then a strange incident happened. On December 21, that is a day after Shah left, Sujata Mondal Khan, the wife of BJP MP from Bishnupur Saumitra Khan, re-joined the TMC. In reaction her husband immediately told the mediapersons that he is going to send divorce notice to his wife.
Sujata made a much bigger sacrifice for the cause of TMC supremo and state chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
These two developments took some wind out of the sails of the BJP and in a way stop a sort of demoralisation in the TMC rank and file.
Both Jitendra and Sujata were upset over the way the BJP bigwigs, including Shah, were indulging in personalized attack on Mamata Banerjee.
While Jitendra Tiwari left the party for only one day, Sujata and her husband, who won the 2014 Lok Sabha poll on TMC ticket, had joined the BJP on the eve of 2019 parliamentary election. Saumitra got the ticket of the saffron party and this time he once again won from Bishnupur constituency. He was also made president of state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of the BJP
Wife Sujata played a crucial role in the victory of her husband. She also shared dais with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But four months before the Assembly election for West Bengal, what prompted her to bid goodbye to the saffron brigade and that too by sacrificing her marital life?
The return of Jitendra and Sujata to the Mamata Banerjee camp need to be studied in proper perspective. True, a number of TMC leaders, including ministers, have joined the BJP. But save former minister Suvendhu Adhikari and to some extent, Mihir Goswami, MLAs from Nandigram and Cooch Behar South respectively, none of the other leaders has any big base of his own.
It is not that only Jitendra and Sujata have made a homecoming, there are a large number of grassroots level workers from other parties who are joining the TMC. In the state where leaders are virtually worshipped like idols, dismissing Mamata Banerjee as a non-entity would be a gross mistake. Opposing or criticising her politics and style of governance may be one thing but ridiculing and humiliating her is quite different. She is still a mass leader who has made a place in the heart of crores of Bengalis. So, stating in the course of speech – as Amit Shah did – that “Didi, you would be left alone by the time the Assembly election comes” has the potential to backfire.
It is true that the BJP had won 18 Lok Sabha seats out of 42 in the 2019 election against 22 by the TMC. But comparing both the Assembly and parliamentary elections would be hazardous, and that too in the state where the BJP has hardly any leader of the stature of Mamata Banerjee.
Perhaps the BJP has not learnt the lesson from the rout in two Assembly elections in Delhi in 2015 and 2020. The saffron party could win only three and seven Assembly seats in the two polls held just nine months after the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019. In the Lok Sabha poll the saffron party made a clean sweep winning all the seven seats.
The BJP carried out a very forceful campaigns in both the Assembly elections but failed to make any impact on Arvind Kejriwal. In 2015 the party had even a good chief ministerial face, Kiran Bedi, yet it was decimated. In the second election it put up none as the CM candidate.
The problem with the BJP is that its leaders, including Amit Shah, are committing so much blunders in their speeches in the state whose people are extremely conscious of their culture, language and politics. For example, Amit Shah, while speaking on December 19, said that the people of Bengal have seen 27 years of the Left Front rule, when the fact is that even a child in that state knows that it ruled for 34 long years. Similarly, during his previous trip to West Bengal in the first week of November, he, while paying tributes to Birsa Munda, recalled the latter’s contributions to the first War of Independence in 1857 when the fact is that the tribal leader was not even born then.
Not only that he had then also said that Rabindranath Tagore was born in Bolpur, instead of Kolkata. Exposing one’s shallowness about Bengal may cost the party. This may not be the case in many other states. The common refrain is how can the BJP promise to convert the state into “Sonaar Bangla” when its top leader does not even know the basic fact about West Bengal, its history and culture.
As the anti-incumbency factor is not as strong against Mamata Banerjee it would be an uphill task for the BJP to dislodge her.
True the earlier version of the BJP, that is Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a Bengali, in 1951 yet it is a fact that between 1952 and 1998 Lok Sabha elections not a single person could win either on the BJP or BJS ticket. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh won only three seats in the first Lok Sabha poll in 1952. Two of the three seats were from Bengal. Yet for full 46 years there was hardly any taker of the Sangh Parivar brand of nationalism in the state. Perhaps the Bengali sub-nationalism may be a factor in keeping it away.
The BJP wants to come to power by playing this sub-nationalism card.
This is one reason why it has, at least in public, softened or changed its stand on many Bengali social and religious reformers.
However, when the statue of the 19th century reformer, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was vandalised on the eve of Lok Sabha election in 2019 the TMC blamed the BJP for it.