Kolkata: Over the past few years, Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee have regularly coordinated their moves against the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre. In the latest example on Wednesday, they jointly convened a meeting of some opposition party chief ministers to chalk out a common action plan against some of the Centre’s moves.
Despite this, the Congress’s Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury has emerged as one of Banerjee’s staunchest critics, subsequently being branded as ‘an agent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’.
When in Delhi, Chowdhury takes frequent digs at the BJP-led Union government. But when in his home state of Bengal, Chowdhury’s salvos are mostly directed at Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), despite the BJP’s meteoric rise as the TMC’s principal opponent. The BJP looks like the only party that can topple the TMC government in the 2021 assembly elections.
When Chowdhury writes his social media posts, or delivers video messages, in English, evidently aiming at the national audience, he mostly targets the BJP. But when he uses Bengali, he targets the TMC far more than the BJP.
An analysis of Chowdury’s Facebook posts made between April 1 and August 26 reveal that of the 160 posts made in Bengali, as many 83 were against the state’s TMC government, while in 13, he targeted the Modi-led Centre, and in three posts he criticised both the Centre and the state.
During this same period, he made 37 posts in English or Hindi, in which he targeted the Modi government in 18 posts and the TMC in only one. Also, in the articles he wrote for English-language publications, he mostly targeted the Centre.
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury speaks in the Lok Sabha during the Winter Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2019. Photo: PTI
This trend has been noticed by social media users and Chowdhury’s posts frequently draw critical comments from people opposing the BJP, mostly TMC supporters.
“It’s Bengali when targeting the state government (because the most of the people will read and understand), but it’s English when targeting the ruler in Delhi (because many may read but most of the BJP’s target voters in Bengal would either skip the larger parts of the content or would simply give them a miss). You are excelling in the game (sic),” Samrat Chowdhury, a member of the Bengali rights group Bangla Pokkho, commented on one of Chowdhury’s posts.
Understandably, Chowdhury is consistently facing the TMC’s ire for allegedly being ‘an agent of the BJP and RSS’. “There is a Congress leader named Adhir Chowdhury who is the biggest agent of the RSS and the BJP in Bengal,” TMC Lok Sabha MP Kalyan Banerjee said in public meetings in June and July.
Bengal BJP leaders have quite conspicuously avoided criticising Chowdhury, even though they regularly mock the Congress party.
A vocal critic
Over the past month, Chowdhury has mocked the chief minister’s claim to have reduced unemployment rates in the state by 40%, demanding Banerjee’s resignation for “utter mismanagement” in handling the COVID-19 situation. He also squarely blamed the CM for the recent fiasco at the Visva Bharati University campus, while accusing the state government of continuing to hide data related to COVID-19 infection and deaths. He also said that corruption in Bengal can come to an end only with the fall of the TMC regime.
Also Read: The Boundary Wall at Bengal’s Visva-Bharati Campus Is Another Chapter in ‘Mamata vs BJP’
During April-May, he mostly sided with the Centre’s versions on the two issues that saw the Modi and Banerjee governments collide – the sending of inter-ministerial central teams to examine gaps in Bengal’s COVID-19 management and the return of migrant workers.
He thanked the Centre for “saving” the people of the state from Mamata Banerjee’s “mismanagement” of COVID-19 and even wrote to Modi saying the state government had ‘miserably failed’ to tackle the situation in the aftermath of cyclone Amphan.
However, on August 4, while addressing an indoor gathering in Barrackpore in remembrance of a former Left Front minister, Chowdhury attacked both the TMC and the BJP for ‘plotting to make politics opposition-free’ and dividing people in the name of religion and ethnicity.
PM Narendra Modi and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee. Photo: PTI
The current leadership of the Bengal Congress consists mostly of critics of Mamata Banerjee. This is one of the reasons why a majority of the party’s leaders are vehemently opposed to any alliance with the TMC and are in favour of tying up with the Left to offer a ‘third alternative’ to the TMC and the BJP.
Nevertheless, Chowdhury’s vocal and proactive opposition to the TMC regime has drawn special attention.
Also Read: CPI(M) Internal Letter Reveals Bengal’s Young Are Still Shifting Support to BJP, TMC
Survival compulsions
Political observers feel that Chowdhury’s strong anti-TMC stance comes from his personal compulsion to hold his own fort in the Murshidabad district from the ruling party’s onslaught.
Murshidabad has the highest Muslim population in India – 4.7 million Muslims live in the district. Muslims make up 67% of the population, according to the Census of 2011. It is also the district with the most number of assembly seats (22) in Bengal. Since 2016, the TMC has significantly weakened Chowdhury’s hold over the district, poaching one confidante after another.
The TMC managed to win only six of these 22 seats in the 2016 assembly elections. However, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it bagged two of the district’s three Lok Sabha seats, losing out the other to Chowdhury. In 2021, the ruling party is eyeing the large majority of Bengal’s about 27% Muslim votes, for which a clean sweep of Murshidabad is crucial.
The psephologist Biswanath Chakraborty, a professor of political science at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, said that the Left, which principally targeted the TMC ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, started opposing the BJP more vehemently after the results. This reveals that the BJP had eaten into their support base. However, if the Congress also lost its vote share, it was to the TMC, he said.
“Chowdhury knows that it is due to his uncompromising opposition to the TMC government that he managed to retain his seat amid a highly polarised battle between the TMC and the BJP in 2019. It is only by opposing the TMC that he may manage to pull the anti-incumbency votes towards the Congress instead of the BJP,” Chakraborty said.
According to political analyst Sambit Pal, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in Dhenkanal, Chowdhury’s compulsions are different from those of the Left leaders in Bengal.
“The Left, though formally speaks of equidistance from the TMC and the BJP, is still confused if it should pitch their campaign higher against the BJP or the TMC. A good section in the Left camp considers the BJP a greater threat. However, the Congress, especially Chowdhury, has little confusion. Their threat in Bengal comes from the TMC. Murshidabad is the Congress’s last stronghold and the BJP is a minor challenge there compared to the TMC,” Pal said.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based journalist and author.