As India prepares to start voting to elect the 18th Lok Sabha, West Bengal will be among the states that will open the innings. Three of the state’s 42 parliamentary constituencies will vote in the first phase on Friday, April 19.
Political observers who follow this region anticipate a keen contest. They wouldn’t be disappointed, going by ‘VIP movement’ in the region. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee camped in north Bengal for a couple of weeks in the run up to the first phase.
During this time, Jalpaiguri was hit by a devastating cyclone. The CM made it a point to be seen at the forefront of her government’s outreach, visiting family members of the deceased and ensuring prompt relief.
She invested a lot of time meeting party workers and local leaders as well as interacting with a cross section of the communities. At public rallies, she has been exhorting women to continue to back her up so that schemes like ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’, which puts Rs 500-1,000 into the accounts of women, can continue and expand. Women voters are seen to be the bulwark of Banerjee’s support base.
On the other hand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly addressed rallies in north Bengal, at least one in every district, to drive home the point that Trinamool’s is a corrupt government, and only he can take the party to task.
“Earlier, PMs would hold election programmes in these parts once in maybe 10-15 years. That too for an hour or so. But this time, it is like a deluge,” Animesh Bose, an activist working in the region said.
On the face of it, the unassuming trio of Cooch Behar, Alipurduars and Jalpaiguri, in the extreme north of Bengal, past the ‘Chicken’s Neck,’ may not come across as political hotseats. But their recent voting patterns have put them up prominently in the electoral map of India’s fourth-most populous state.
Between them, the seats cover the three eponymous districts (with a little bit of overlapping of some Assembly constituencies) that form Bengal’s picturesque Terai-Dooars region. For long, these parts were known mostly as holiday destinations for the Bengali ‘middle class’, thanks to its undulating hills, rapid rivers, savannah forests and tea estates.
Left Front constituents Forward Block (Cooch Behar), Revolutionary Socialist Party (Alipurduars) and Communist Party of India-Marxist had a stranglehold over the three Lok Sabha constituencies during the Front’s three-decade plus reign in Bengal.
That changed after Mamata Banerjee assumed power in 2011. Her Trinamool Congress won all three seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections only to cede them in 2019 to former ally and current bête noire Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). By then, the Left parties’ organisation lay in tatters, like in most parts of the state.
Political analysts generally point towards a widespread transfer of the erstwhile Left, and, in some cases, Congress’, votes as the reason for the BJP’s meteoric rise in West Bengal. The saffron party bagged nearly 41% votes in 2019 and 38% in the 2021 Assembly elections, way ahead of around 10% in 2016. The Left and Congress have been reduced to anaemic single digit percentages.
The three Phase 1 seats fit this overall trend, but also go beyond it with an element of anti-Bengali sentiments in these parts and even some separatist calls. Of late, the BJP is seen to have harnessed this to its benefit.
All three seats are reserved constituencies: Alipurduars for Scheduled Tribes, and Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar for Scheduled Castes. The SC voters are mostly from the Rajbongshi community who identify with the erstwhile Koch kingdom.
The Koch kingdom sprung up in the early 16th Century, by carving out a considerable territory from the Baro Bhuiyans, and the area is now spread across Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, as well as Bangladesh. The formation continued to exist as a princely state during the British Raj after which it joined the Union.
Demands for a ‘Greater Cooch Behar’ state have come forth from time to time, with its proponents both harking back to lost glory while simultaneously seeking a better deal for the Rajbongshi community and the Kamtapuri language.
The agenda took a violent turn with the formation of the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation in 1995, bringing back memories of 1980s unrest in the Darjeeling Hills during the heydays of Subash Ghising. His Gorkha National Liberation Front had then championed the cause of a separate state for Nepali-speaking people of the Hills and Dooars.
Such demands for carving out a separate unit from Bengal, however, never found any takers in mainstream politics. Be it the Congress, the Left partners or, later, Trinamool, no serious contender in Bengal politics was willing to indulge this agenda.
The CPM, under Jyoti Basu’s leadership, placated Ghising with a degree of autonomy, a deal which held well into the last leg of the Left Front government. By then, a new generation of militant leadership had cropped up and soon Bimal Gurung’s Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) replaced the Hill’s old guard.
The then BJP smelt an opportunity. It broke ranks with other mainstream parties and secured a deal with GJM. This paved the way in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections for party veteran Jaswant Singh to get elected from Darjeeling, a seat that has remained with the party.
Before that, the BJP never had much electoral luck in Bengal. Former party chief Tapan Sikdar did manage to win Dumdum during the Vajpayee wave and even secured a ministry, but couldn’t hold on to the seat. The party then played second fiddle to the nascent Trinamool Congress until the two parted ways.
The success of the Darjeeling model was followed up in the Modi years when the party wooed and secured the support of Ananta Rai ‘Maharaj’, one of the flag-bearers of the Koch homeland agenda. The gambit paid off and in 2019, Nishith Pramanik, a young leader who was among many to desert Trinamool, “made the Lotus bloom”— common metaphor in the Bengali press for BJP securing a seat.
Apart from the Nepali-speaking population and the Rajbongshis, the right-wing ecosystem also actively wooed Adivasis in the region, replicating its model in central India. The Adivasi communities (like Oraons and Mundas) were brought from central India to Dooars by British tea planters in search of cheap labour to work in their gardens. Now they make up a substantial part of the region’s population.
The gardens in Terai-Dooars followed a peculiar feudal structure until as late as the 1990s, pointed out Suman Goswami, a member of APDR in Alipurduar. “The workers there are mostly from Adivasi and Nepali-speaking communities. While the garden owners and managers were outsiders, the Babus running the show were mostly Bengalis from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and the chowkidars from Bihar,” he said.
For the working class, the Bengalis became the face of exploitation by the management. Even now, Adivasis and Nepali-speakers are wary of Bengali politicians and leaders. This works in favour of the BJP as it is viewed as a party from outside unlike Trinamool, the Congress as well as CPM, and other Left parties, that are considered to be ‘Bangali parties’.
The Right-wing ecosystem has been able to make all these factors feed into its overall saffron narrative, of course substantially leaning onto the broad shoulders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP.
Bengal has seen a substantial spurt in activities of the RSS and its allied outfits in the last decade or so. The strengthening of BJP’s organisation in the state that preceded its electoral success, was helmed by pracharak Dilip Ghosh. At the same time, shakhas and schools have multiplied across the state and north Bengal has been particularly in focus.
“Pracharaks now live even at very remote hamlets, ones that are completely cut off during the Monsoons,” Goswami said.
But all this may not be enough. While the BJP publicly exudes confidence, the Modi blitzkrieg betrays the fact that the party doesn’t want to leave anything to chance.
For one, the issue of a separate state has hardly resonated this election season. “The Kamtapuri issue is dead. Greater Cooch Behar still could be an issue, but there are so many factions now.” said Soumitra Ghosh, who works with adivasis and forest dwellers in the region. “If the BJP has Ananta Rai, Trinamool has his former colleague Bangshi Badan Barman,” Ghosh pointed out.
“None of them will matter; people have seen through their plays,” a CPM functionary in Alipurduar, claimed, recalling how the opposing factions turned a commemoration of legendary Koch military commander Chilarai into a political slugfest. Both CM Banerjee and Union minister Pramanik were brought in to deliver speeches at the same event by their respective camps as a show of strength.
He claimed the Left parties will claw back some space but conceded that BJP still enjoyed an undercurrent of support. Ghosh, however, said: “These elections won’t be like the previous one. The contest will be more keen, at least in this region.
“The upturn in BJP’s fortunes started as people were angry with the Trinamool for rampant violence during the 2018 Gram Panchayat elections,” Ghosh pointed out. “In 2019, the Pulwama attack helped them and in 2021 there was a perception of a saffron wave.” Almost a fifth of the Assembly seats that the BJP won in 2021 came from this region.
This time, however, the Trinamool is better placed to take on the BJP. For one, despite all its efforts, the saffron party failed to dislodge Banerjee’s government. On top of that, the ruling dispensation managed a good show in last year’s local body elections.
“Their presence in Gram Panchayats has enabled them to push welfare schemes at the village level, which is likely to mobilise women voters,” Ghosh said.
The presence of leaders from the north like Udayan Guha (from Cooch Behar) in Banerjee’s Cabinet is also likely to bolster Trinamool’s fightback.
Though it could have better highlighted issues like the Uniform Civil Code, which could strike a chord with the Adivasis like it has done in central India, Ghosh pointed out. Trinamool has taken on the Modi government on the issues of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) virulently.
Goswami, on the other hand, likened these elections to the one held in 1977, after Emergency was lifted: “Neither local agenda nor important issues like livelihood are going to matter. It is all boiling down to perceptions about the government.”