The West Bengal Panchayat polls outcome has wrecked the Bharatiya Janata Party’s high hopes of winning 35 out of 42 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections to make up for anticipated deficits in Bihar and Karnataka. This is the real significance of Bengal rural bodies’ poll results for national politics ahead of the 2024 Parliamentary elections and is bound to raise the morale of Opposition forces trying to unite against many odds.
The sweeping and clear-cut rural verdict, especially of women voters, in favour of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress indicates that Amit Shah’s fervent appeal in April to the Bengal electorate to give the BJP more than 35 seats in 2024 to ensure a third prime ministerial term for Narendra Modi is most likely to remain just that – an appeal.
BJP Limps Behind the Galloping Victor
The Trinamool Congress is well-entrenched and unshakeable in its bastion. There are no signs of poriborton, the Bangla word for change, emanating from the outcome, unlike the verdict in the 2008 Panchayat polls which first signalled disillusionment and discontent with Left Front rule.
The party is in a good place and in the electorate’s good books 12 years after it defeated the communists and grabbed the reins of power. Voters clearly turned the BJP slogan “No Vote for Mamata” on its head into “Now Vote for Mamata” backing the Chief Minister to the hilt.
The final results will not be available before 6 pm today as paper ballots were used in the Panchayat polls instead of electronic voting machines which dispense results at a furious pace. But the dominance of the Trinamool Congress is crystal clear from trends emerging from centres where the votes for 3317 Gram Panchayats with 63229 seats, 341 Panchayat Samitis with 9730 seats, and 20 Zilla Parishads with 928 seats are being counted by hand.
The BJP is no doubt the runner-up in the Panchayat race. But it is a very, very poor second, limping far behind the galloping victor. And snapping at the BJP’s heels is the CPI(M)-Congress-Indian Secular Front coalition revealing that BJP faces stiff competition even in the Opposition space.
The Numbers
The latest results, even as I write, show that out of 928 Zilla Parishad seats, Trinamool Congress has won or is leading in 526, the BJP in only 15 compared to Trinamool Congress’ humungous 526, and the CPI(M) and Congress in seven each. In South 24 Parganas, Trinamool Congress is winning 84 out of 85 seats.
And out of 9730 Panchayat Samiti seats, Trinamool Congress has bagged or is going to bag 5263; the BJP’s tally is merely 572 while the CPI(M)’s and Congress’ scores are 125 and 84 respectively.
Equally importantly, out of 63229 Gram Panchayat seats, Trinamool Congress is victorious in 42,122 or two-thirds of the seats; the BJP winning only 9307 and the CPI(M) and Congress 2932 and 2642 respectively. Trinamool Congress is towering above its rivals and comes across as electorally unassailable in 'Mamataland'.
Before the official results are out, back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that the ruling party has romped home with 52 percent of votes. In the 2021 assembly polls – the last test of popularity in Bengal – Trinamool Congress harvested 48 percent of votes. In two years, its vote share in rural Bengal has jumped by four percent.
Messages for 2024
This significant increase sends out several important messages ahead of the 2024 Parliamentary elections.
First and foremost, voters haven’t dumped the Trinamool Congress despite multiple corruption scandals over teachers’ recruitment and cattle and coal smuggling rackets which have resulted in the arrest of a key cabinet minister, MLAs, youth leaders, and top officials close to the government by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate.
The voters clearly ignored the Chor, or thief slur, flung at the Trinamool Congress leadership by Opposition parties and acknowledged their appreciation and gratitude for the financial befits they reaped thanks to Lakshmi Bhandar and other populist schemes. Significantly, Trinamool Congress performance is better in seats where women voters outnumber male voters as they are the biggest gainers from income-providing schemes launched especially after 2021. There is no doubt that goodies won the day!
Secondly, the huge mandate cements the position of Abhishek Banerjee, the CM’s nephew and heir-apparent who did not rise from the ranks but was anointed by Mamata Banerjee as her successor and second-in-command. He undertook a 54-day-long state-wide march to address voters. His election campaign was built around the BJP central government starving Bengal of funds for rural jobs guarantee and rural housing schemes.
Banerjee intelligently and successfully projected Bengalis as a victim of Delhi’s high-handedness. And to harness the rebellion and defiance which characterises the eastern state, he declared that if the Centre doesn’t stop depriving Bengal of its legitimate dues, he would lead a march to Delhi by one million Bengalis to confront Modi and Shah.
As the results pour in, both Mamata and Abhishek are busy profusely thanking voters for their big endorsement and forecasting an even better performance by the Trinamool Congress in 2024.
(SNM Abdi is a distinguished journalist and ex-Deputy Editor of Outlook. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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