The panchayat elections in West Bengal have a way of grabbing the headlines, and usually not for the best of reasons. Unfailingly bloody and violent (the death toll this year is 16 so far), Bengal’s rural polls are marked by bitter political turf wars and murderous thuggery.
As the state heads into yet another edition of panchayat elections on 8 July, the stakes are particularly high for the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the principal Opposition party, the BJP, since both are viewing it as a sort of a dry-run before the Lok Sabha polls next year.
Even the Congress and the Left parties, who are fighting the panchayat elections together, are looking to take the long road back to relevance in the state by putting up a decent showing at the hustings.
Trinamool Congress chairperson and chief minister Mamata Banerjee has made no bones about the fact that she was pulling out all the stops to win big in the rural polls. Not only did she hit the campaign trail herself, something she has not done in a panchayat election since 2013, but she also made all her party’s top leaders campaign for the candidates.
Why TMC Needs a Spectacular Win
Incidentally, the TMC swept the rural polls in 2018, winning 73 percent of the 63,229-gram panchayat seats, 90 percent of the 9,730 panchayat samiti seats, and 95 percent of the 928 zilla parishad seats. Of this, it won 34 percent of the total number of seats unopposed, that is to say, no rival political party fielded candidates in those seats, or if it did, the candidates withdrew their nominations allegedly owing to violent intimidation by the TMC cadre.
Can the TMC win the panchayat polls as spectacularly as it did the last time? Mamata will certainly hope so. However, Bengal’s political firmament has undergone a tectonic shift since 2018. While the BJP had just two MPs and three MLAs at that time, today, it has 17 MPs and 69 MLAs, and is, therefore, a much more credible Opposition than it used to be. Significantly, this time the TMC has won unopposed in only 10 percent of the total number of panchayat seats, which is a sharp decline from the 34 percent of the seats it won unopposed in 2018.
But it is not just the BJP that the TMC has to worry about. Its own image has been considerably tarnished because of rampant corruption on the part of party functionaries, and the fact that many members of its top leadership are facing allegations of having committed humongous scams and cheating the public of their money. Mamata’s nephew, TMC general secretary, and MP Abhishek Banerjee, is among those being questioned by the central investigative agencies for his alleged involvement in a coal scam and a school teacher recruitment scam.
Hence, a convincing win at the panchayat polls is crucial for the TMC chief right now. First, it will show that Mamata’s hegemony over the state continues to be undiminished and prove that despite the inroads that the BJP has made in the state, it is she and her party who are still loved by the trinamool, the grassroots, after whom her party is named. Second, it will offset some of the bad optics created by the charges of corruption and misrule by her government. And third, it will deal a body blow to the morale of BJP workers and put her in a stronger position going into the Lok Sabha polls in 2024 — one where the TMC will undoubtedly hope to recover the ground it ceded to the BJP in 2019 when the right-wing party won as many as 18 out of Bengal’s 42 parliamentary seats.
BJP Looking to Cement Grassroot Influence
There is also a perception that should the TMC pull off a decisive victory on 8 July, Mamata will command much more heft at the national Opposition table. The meeting of anti-BJP parties in Bengaluru on 13 and 14 July will take place just days after the results of the panchayat polls are out. If Mamata goes into it riding on a big win, she is bound to have a lot more bargaining chips in her kitty when the talks turn to the sharing of seats in the general elections next year.
If the panchayat polls are of enormous significance for the TMC, they are no less so for the BJP. The ruling party at the Centre had smelt blood in 2019 when it won 18 Lok Sabha seats and reduced Mamata’s party to a mere 20 seats from its previous tally of 34. The stunning performance had emboldened the BJP’s central leadership to believe that they could conquer Bengal in the 2021 Assembly elections. That dream came to nought when Mamata roared back to power, although the BJP did get 69 seats — an impressive jump from the three legislature seats it had before.
However, since then the state unit of the BJP has been riven with factionalism, which has probably been exacerbated by the fact that the party has no standout leadership face in Bengal.
Hence, the BJP too is looking at the panchayat elections as an opportunity to cement its influence at the grassroots level. If it is able to contain the TMC and dramatically improve its seat count, then it will once again be on a high when it heads into the Lok Sabha polls next year.
In the 2008 panchayat elections, when Bengal was under the Left Front government, the TMC surprised everyone and won 24 percent of the gram panchayat seats, 23 percent of panchayat samiti seats, and 16 percent of zilla parishad seats. It was a decisive setback to the Left Front and it heralded the winds of political change that swept across Bengal and culminated in Mamata ousting the Left from power in 2011.
(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author. She tweets @ShumaRaha. 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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