Kolkata: As the West Bengal assembly elections came to a close on Thursday with the eighth phase polling, it’s the six districts with a higher concentration of Muslims that all poll pundits are looking at.
Muslims make up 27.01% of the state’s population, according to the 2011 Census. They are concentrated mostly in six of the state’s total 23 districts, though the districts of East Burdwan and Howrah, too, have a significant Muslim population.
Having 61% of the state’s total Muslim population (1.5 crore of 2.46 crore) and 40.13% of the state’s total assembly seats (118 of 294), these six districts are expected to play a significant role behind the election results, especially in the wake of a perceived Muslim consolidation behind the state’s ruling party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
The districts are Murshidabad, Malda, South 24-Parganas, North 24-Parganas, Birbhum and Uttar Dinajpur. In these six districts taken together, Muslims make up 42.04% of the population.
Of them, the BJP had fared well in the Hindu-dominated areas of Malda, Uttar Dinajpur and North 24-Parganas in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, mostly due to a split in Muslim votes between the TMC and the Congress.
The nature of the contest is different in these districts. Going by the Lok Sabha election voting pattern and more recent trends in public sentiments, Uttar Dinajpur (49.94% Muslim population), with nine seats, and Birbhum (37.06% Muslim population), having 11 seats, are expected to witness bipolar contests between the TMC and the BJP in most parts of the districts.
Malda (51.27% Muslim population) is expected to witness a triangular contest between the TMC, the Congress and the BJP in all 12 seats. In Murshidabad (66.88% Muslim population), a district with 22 assembly seats, the contest is expected to be between the TMC and the Congress, mostly.
The TMC hopes to do better in Murshidabad, Malda and Uttar Dinajpur this time as Muslims seem to be shifting their allegiance toward the TMC from the Congress in the recent months.
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“Muslim clerics and religious leaders and people associated with organisations such as Jamaat e Islami carried out a whisper campaign across Muslim-dominated areas to vote for the TMC to bring Mamata Banerjee back to power. Despite this intense communal campaign, we will bag more than half of the seats in the district comfortably,” BJP’s Malda district unit president Gobinda Chandra Mandal told The Wire.
In Murshidabad, several Muslim persons sounded aggrieved with the Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury – the district was known as his bastion until the TMC breached it in 2019 – because they thought Chowdhury had been more critical of Banerjee than the BJP. Chowdhury, indeed, has been one of the TMC chief’s most vocal and staunch critics for many years.
In 2019, the district had voted mostly in favour of the TMC in the Lok Sabha elections, helping the state’s ruling party in taking the lead in one-third of the assembly segments.
Even though Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis Ittehad e Muslimeen fielded candidates in seven seats in Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur districts, local residents did not seem too impressed by their campaign.
However, in South 24-Parganas (35.57% Muslim population), which has 31 assembly seats, and North 24-Parganas (25.82% Muslim population), which has 33 assembly seats, the TMC’s challenge is to retain its share of Muslim votes that helped them remain the state’s largest party, both in terms of seat and vote share, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
In these two districts, the recent rise of the Indian Secular Front, a party led by a Muslim cleric that is contesting in alliance with the Left and the Congress, has threatened to reduce the TMC’s share of Muslim votes compared to the Lok Sabha elections.
In nearly half-a-dozen assembly seats spread over these two districts, the role of the ISF could play a determining role behind the results, political observers feel.
The 2019 Lok Sabha election trend revealed that in south Bengal, the TMC was ahead of others in most seats where the Muslim population of a constituency was more than 30%. This trend was missing in north Bengal, where in Malda and Uttar Dinajpur the Congress, too, drew significant votes in Muslim-dominated areas.
Outgoing state library minister Siddiqullah Chowdhury, who also heads the Islamic clerics’ organisation Jamaat Ulema e Hind’s Bengal chapter, sounded confident that the Muslims will vote for the TMC en masse.
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“There are two reasons. First, the government has worked for the downtrodden in general and it is a common knowledge that the majority of the Muslims are among the economically weaker section of the society. And second, only the TMC can stop the BJP’s bandwagon in Bengal,” Chowdhury said.
However, in South 24-Parganas and North 24-Parganas, the ISF carried out an intense campaign accusing the Mamata Banerjee government of having treated the Muslims merely as a vote bank.
“We have fought the elections not on communal or religious issues but on economic issues,” said Nausad Siddiqui, the ISF candidate from Bhangar, the seat where the ISF was perceived to have the best prospect of winning.
In the 2021 election campaign, seeking votes on communal lines had been an overt trait for both the BJP and the TMC. While the BJP sought to polarise Hindus telling them of the ‘impending Muslim take-over’ of the state, Banerjee too had urged Muslims not to vote in a divided manner. Her remarks were mostly in the context of the south Bengal district where the ISF’s rise has left the TMC as an anxious camp. The ECI had banned her from campaigning for 24 hours, while the poll panel later also cautioned BJP leader Suvendhu Adhikari for calling Muslim-dominated areas a ‘mini Pakistan’.
Whether Muslim votes consolidate behind the TMC or remain split between the TMC and the Left-Congress-ISF alliance may well end up playing the decider in this one of the most intensely-fought electoral battles in post-independence Bengal.