Bengal election analysis

  • Three years after a huge win in the 2016 elections, the 2019 Lok Sabha elections were a wake-up call for the Trinamool Congress. 
  • The BJP won 18 of 40 seats, and over 40% of the vote. 
  • The Trinamool doubled down on its already extensive welfare web for the poor, bringing in Duare Sarkaar, and Didi ke Bolo, a campaign where complaints could be made to a centralised phone number.
  • The Trinamool had focused on making the schemes more accessible to people.

CAUSES OF TMC's WIN

  • The central focus of many of these schemes were women, a constituency that has stayed loyal to Mamata Banerjee. 
  • Across districts, even if men of a household were voting for the BJP, many women of the same household were staying with Mamata.
  • As the campaign progressed, the elections devolved into a battle of personalities, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee versus Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and to an extent Home Minister Amit Shah. 
  • This ended up suiting the Trinamool as even though there was anger on the ground against local-level violence and petty corruption, this was against the Trinamool and not against Mamata herself. 
  • Religious polarisation was at the centre of the campaign all through.
  • Faced with the prospect of the BJP coming to power, the Muslim community, even in strongholds of the Congress and the Left, chose to side with the Trinamool. 
  • On the other hand, the BJP set itself an Everest-like target of winning Bengal without the close to 30% Muslim vote. 
  • This required an extremely high level of polarisation among Hindus, which did not happen.
  • The run-up to the campaign was headlined by high-profile shifts from the Trinamool to the BJP and this benefitted TMC.
  • At the ground level, Trinamool leaders fought the elections with its backs to the wall, with many desperate to show those that left their place. 
  • The BJP on the other hand, with the new entrants, uncharacteristically appeared ideologically hollow. 
  • Differences over seat distribution emerged among the old guard of the BJP, those from the Left that joined the party only to defeat the Trinamool, and new entrants from the Trinamool itself. 
  • The new inductions in BJP made for a contradiction on the ground. 
  • For a party that was pitching itself against the Trinamool as non-violent and non-corrupt, many of its candidates inducted from the Trinamool faced their own local allegations of corruption and violence.
  • The BJP campaign fundamentally hinged on two factors, anti-incumbency and alleged Muslim appeasement, and therefore religious polarisation. 
  • The BJP had a manifesto, but not one promise of the manifesto was invested in as part of a sustained campaign pitch, as an alternative to the Trinamool’s welfare schemes. 
  • The central leadership taking ownership of the campaign, and as a result there was no clarity on the chief ministerial candidate, 
  • Hence, there was no answer to the question of who else but Mamata.

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