Why Have TMC Local Level Managers Gone Silent?

During the polling, BJP booth committees seemed to be working more efficiently than TMC booths.

A TMC supporter paints a wall to campaign for the party ahead of Assembly polls, in Howrah, Friday, March 5, 2021. Photo: PTI

Rajan Pandey, The Wire, Jhargram: “Have you turned 18?”, I ask a group of youngsters coming out from a polling booth after voting in Salboni village of Gopiballavpur assembly constituency in Jhargram district of West Bengal. They say yes, and tell me they are in college, but fail to give a convincing answer as to which subjects and courses they are studying. Their looks and responses indicated they were still not adults, but all of them had valid voting cards that they proudly displayed. On asking which party have they voted, they unhesitatingly said, “We have voted for poribortan,” a widely used synonym for saying ‘we want BJP’.

Getting underage voters of own party enrolled in electoral records is not new in India, but only deeply entrenched, and rooted parties with robust organisation are known for doing it. It would have not come as a surprise had the youngsters been Trinamool Congress (TMC) voters. But Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being able to do that thing, that too in remote Jhargram district where a Maoist movement was thriving till just some years ago did come as a surprise, since the party is being projected as “organisationally weak” in West Bengal. Ruling TMC accuses it of being a party of “outsiders” and recent incidences like home minister Amit Shah’s rally getting cancelled due to lack of people and BJP giving tickets to people who are not even party members also give an impression that the party lacks organisation in Bengal. How does one make sense of these contradictory facts?

“We lacked organisation in the state,” says Nitlotpal Hazra (name changed), a BJP booth level worker in Narayangarh assembly segment of West Medinipur district, “but panchayat elections gave us an opportunity as we were the only party that resisted TMC’s harmnad bahini (militia) and their attempts to suppress opposition then, even at the cost of damages and deaths. The benefit of those struggles were evident in Lok Sabha elections 2019 and we won 18 MPs. Since then, we dedicated all energy on organisation building. Our MPs and the central leadership backed us completely and now we can say that we are even more entrenched in Bengal than the TMC”, he concludes.

What Hazra says gets validated from our observations during visits to phase 1 and 2 areas of West Bengal. Even in the remotest villages of districts falling in this phase, BJP flags and banners were neither missing, nor less in numbers compared to the TMC, though the same could not be said about the Left-Congress-ISF (Indian Secular Front) alliance. And during the polling, we could see BJP booth committees working efficiently at all booths we visited. In most of the cases, BJP booths were thronged by more people than the TMC booths.

Also read: From Liberalism To Secularism, the Battle for Bengal Has Just Begun

The silence of TMC’s local level managers

“Don’t ask us, ask common people. Even if you ask a small child he will tell you that there is a wave of poriborton,” said a group of youngsters near a BJP booth in Jhargram when we asked them who is winning this time. Their confidence that common respondents will tell us whom they want to win also signified a new development – voters openly expressing their opinion in the state, across districts. But why is this development so surprising?

“Because West Bengal is a ‘party-society’ state, where the ruling party keeps a tight grip over public spaces and resources,” says political analyst Sajjan Kumar. “During left front days, the left cadres prevented people from openly expressing their anguish against the government and the palpable fear of political violence – for which the state is well known, discouraged the common people from doing so. Opposition voters were not allowed to cast their votes in a large number of places, through threats or through actual violence. The TMC inherited that culture, and till some months back when I was doing fieldwork, common people avoided criticising TMC openly, or saying that they want poriborton”, he says.

This observation is in contradiction to our experience as in most of the places from Bankura to Jhargram to West Medinipur, we found common people not shying away from openly expressing their support for a change of government. Further, the level of political violence witnessed during the first phase of polling is also indicative of the fact that TMC cadres or local level managers at the booths did not prevent opposition voters from exercising their voting right, as expected by many. What explains this change?

“Local level leaders are at the forefront of all struggles and it is us who have to suffer most if political fortunes change,” said Krishnendu Das, a TMC local leader, on condition of anonymity, in Pingla assembly seat of West Medinipur. “We are sensing that a lot of people want change, despite the good work that TMC government has done and what can we do if they vote for BJP? Though we believe Didi is coming back, but what if BJP comes to power? Since we will be in firing line then, we are playing it a bit safe this time,” he admits.

In fact, this sentiment was echoed by a number of TMC local leaders who admitted that the energy and assertion their party displayed at booth level is “slightly” less this time.

“After all we have to live in the same village, we can’t leave our homes and go to the jungle if government changes,” concludes Das, while scrolling through news reports in his phone about phase 1 of polling that concluded minutes back.

Rajan Pandey is a freelance journalist. He is associated with survey agency People’s Pulse.