Tag: congress left

Will Bengal’s Muslims Vote Differently This Time?

Muslim votes sharply split in the 2019 Lok Sabha election but consolidated behind TMC in the 2021 assembly polls.

Kolkata: Abdur Razzak, a middle-aged vegetable trader at Kushidah, known for its weekly Tuesday market, decided on his political choice well before the campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections started.

“I voted for Didi in 2021 (assembly election) and in the panchayat election (in 2023). But this is Rahul Gandhi’s vote,” said Razzak, a voter from the Harishchandrapur assembly segment in northern West Bengal’s Malda district.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

A few kms away, S.K. Nasib, a farmer at Mobarakpur village within Mokdumpur gram panchayat area of the Chanchal assembly segment, echoed him. “Here, equations change from election to election. In the Assembly election, I voted for Didi. In panchayat, I voted for the CPI(M). This is the jot’s turn now.” By ‘jot’, he refers to the Left-Congress alliance.

Harishchandrapur and Chanchal, part of Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, saw close contests between the Left and the Congress for many years until the Trinamool Congress (TMC) breached that impenetrable fortress of Malda, one of Bengal’s three Muslim-majority districts, in 2021.

In Harishchandrapur, Congress’ Mostaque Alam defeated the Left in 2001, Left’s Tajmul Hossain defeated Alam in 2006, Hossain fought on a TMC ticket and defeated Alam in 2011, Alam recovered the seat in 2016 and Hossain won it back in 2021.

The 2021 election saw unprecedented polarisation of Muslim votes in favour of the TMC, as Alam’s vote share reached a record low of only 14%. He came third and lost his deposit, as the BJP came second with a 22% vote share. The TMC had pulled 60% of polled votes.

Alam is now the Left-backed Congress candidate for Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, on a mission to recover the seat from the BJP. He faces the BJP’s incumbent, Khagen Murmu, and TMC’s police officer-turned-politician Prasun Bandyopadhyay. Muslims constitute about 45% of Malda Uttar’s electorate.

Of the seven assembly segments that form the Lok Sabha seat, the TMC holds four and the BJP holds the rest. But the panchayat election trends make Alam confident. In Harishchandrapur, during the zilla parishad election, the Left-Congress combined votes (they contested separately in the rural polls) of 73,302 was above the TMC’s 68,210. The BJP stood at a mere 11,679 votes.

A banner calling for public participation in Mamata Banerjee’s public rally for TMC’s Malda Uttar candidate at Harishchandrapur in Malda district. Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

In Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, going by the panchayat election result in the Zilla parishad seats and the civic polls in Old Maldah municipality, the TMC’s local election votes stood at 4,59,536, (roughly 44%), the Left-Congress combined vote at 3,20,402 (roughly 31%), and the BJP at 233,121 votes (roughly 22%).

Political observers pointed out that in West Bengal, the local poll vote share of the ruling party almost always goes down in bigger elections like assembly and Lok Sabha. They attribute it to the various advantages that the ruling party gets in using the administration.

The TMC has pitched itself as the real anti-BJP force and branded the Bengal Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) as the BJP’s secret friends. But many are not buying it.

“See how Prime Minister Narendra Modi is targeting the Congress saying it will distribute wealth among Muslims. This is because the Congress is his real challenger,” said Hasanul Sarkar, an e-rickshaw driver at Ratua, part of Malda Uttar.

However, Razzak, Nasib and Sarkar all said that they have not been able to convince the women in their homes to vote for the Congress. “They are for Didi. She is giving them pocket money,” quipped Sarkar, referring to the Mamata Banerjee government’s Lakshmir Bhandar scheme of monthly assistance to women from the weaker section of the society.

Sariful Mandal, an elderly farmer at Ratua, fiercely defended the TMC. “After what Banerjee has done for the poor, we cannot betray her. She is the most reliable politician,” he said. He, however, sounded apprehensive that anti-incumbency against the TMC due to corruption charges may result in a decreased vote share.

Muslims make up 27% of West Bengal’s population, according to the 2011 census. They live mostly in the north Bengal districts of Uttar Dinajpur (49.9% share of population) and Malda (51.3%), the central Bengal district of Murshidabad (66.3%) and the south Bengal districts of Birbhum (37%), South 24-Parganas (35.6%), Nadia (26.8%) and North 24-Parganas (25.8%).

Of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, Muslims play a major role in determining the fate of Raiganj, Malda Uttar, Malda Dakshin, Murshidabad, Jangipur, Baharampur, Krishnanagar, Birbhum, Basirhat, Jaynagar and Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha as well as the Balurghat, Uluberia and Bolpur Lok Sabha seats.

In 2019, Muslim votes sharply split between the TMC, the BJP, the Left, and the Congress in four corner contests in the Raiganj seat of Uttar Dinajpur and Malda Uttar. This resulted in the BJP’s victory in Raiganj with a 40% vote share and a 37.6% vote share in Maldah Uttar.

The BJP’s Sreerupa Mitra Chowdhury almost won the Malda Dakshin Lok Sabha, falling short of the Congress incumbent, Abu Hashem Khan Chowdhury, by about 8,000 votes, a meagre 0.7 percentage point less than the Congress’ 34.7% vote share.

However, the equations in all these constituencies changed in the 2021 assembly elections and the 2022-23 elections in the panchayats and municipalities.

Changing equations

The 2021 assembly election saw the TMC sweeping the three Muslim-majority districts – bagging 20 of 22 seats in Murshidabad with a 54% vote share; eight of the 12 seats in Malda with a 53% vote share, and seven of nine seats in Uttar Dinajpur, with a 53.3% vote share. The rest of the seats went to the BJP.

In south Bengal, too, they swept the Muslim-dominated areas, except Bhangar assembly in South 24-Parganas district, where the Left-Congress ally Indian Secular Front (ISF) candidate Naushad Siddiqui won.

But the panchayat elections showed a shift from the political bipolarity of the assembly elections, at least in some pockets.

Ratua resident Saddam Mollah says that the BJP’s 2019 victory in Malda Uttar was largely because it managed to draw the majority of the traditional Left Hindu votes by poaching three-time CPI(M) MLA Murmu. In the panchayat election, a large portion of this vote went back to the Left.

As Muslim votes look likely to sharply split, the fate of the constituency depends on if the BJP manages to bring back the votes that went back to the Left in the panchayat elections, Mollah says.

In Malda Dakshin Lok Sabha, the TMC holds six of the seven assembly segments and the BJP holds one. Here, the BJP has renominated Chowdhury, currently the party’s Englishbazar MLA, while the Congress has fielded the incumbent’s son, Isha Khan Chowdhury, a former MLA. Isha’s biggest asset is his late uncle, ABA Ghani Khan Chowdhury, a legendary Congress leader whose name still works in elections in Malda.

In Murshidabad Lok Sabha, CPIM state secretary Md. Salim is the Congress-backed candidate and hopes to wrest the seat from the TMC. Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

The TMC nominee is Shahjahan Ali Raihan, who once served as the national secretary of the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO), the student wing of the Jamiaat Ulema e Hind, worked as a journalist at a Bengali daily and later enrolled as a doctoral researcher in modern history at the University of Oxford.

In Malda Dakshin, where nearly 59% of the electorate are Muslims, the BJP managed to secure a 34% vote share by sheer polarisation of Hindu votes in 2019. But the panchayat election data shows that the combined vote of the Congress and the Left stood at 41%, marginally behind the TMC’s 42%. The BJP’s vote share was only 15%.

“This vote will neither be like the assembly elections nor the panchayat polls. Even the Lok Sabha election 2019 pattern may not repeat. We may see new equations. Many things have changed and many people are silent about what they are thinking,” said Azhar Ali Mollah, a vegetable vendor at Manikchak, which falls within the Malda Dakshin constituency.

Among these changes, Mollah said, is a weaker pro-Hindutva wave, higher resentment against the TMC over corruption and local governance and the coming together of the Left and the Congress.

Sujapur, one of the assembly segments of Malda Dakshin, presents a perfect example of the changing voting pattern. It has the densest Muslim population in the state. The segment is composed of Kaliachak I community development block, where 89.3% of the population are Muslims.

Isha won the Sujapur seat in 2016 with a margin of 47,000 votes and his father Abu Hashem took a lead of about 30,000 votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections but the TMC won it in 2021 with an incredible margin of 1.3 lakh votes. In a pro-TMC storm, Khan Chowdhury Jr.’s vote share came down to 10.7%.

But the trend started reversing, as the panchayat election saw neck and neck fight between the Congress and the TMC – going by the results of the three zilla parishad seats – the Left-Congress combined votes stood at 114,281 and the TMC’s at 110,562.

A similar split is expected in Raiganj Lok Sabha, where Muslims make up about 46% of the electorate. Of the seven assembly segments, the TMC holds five and the BJP had two until Raiganj BJP MLA Krishna Kalyani switched to the TMC. Kalyani is now the TMC’s Raiganj candidate, while the BJP has shifted the incumbent, Debasree Chaudhuri, to Kolkata Dakshin constituency.

In Raiganj, the votes of the Left and the Congress combined and that of BJP stood at about 25% each, marginally higher on the side of the former. The TMC’s share stood above 40%.

The BJP’s new candidate is Kartik Pal, who was once the chairman of the TMC-run Kaliaganj municipality. The Left-backed Congress candidate is former three-time Left MLA Ali Imran Ramz. While the TMC hopes to eat into BJP’s votes by fielding a former BJP legislator, the Left-Congress hopes this would push some Muslim voters towards the alliance.

Such splits in Muslim votes – though at varying extents – are also expected in other parts of the state. According to Abdul Matin, a political scientist at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Muslim votes are expected to split sharply in the three Muslim-majority districts but the intensity of the split will be less in south Bengal, where the TMC is organisationally a lot stronger.

“The TMC’s hegemony over Muslim votes will surely weaken, more in northern and central Bengal and less in the south. Upset with the TMC’s corruption and mis-governance, a section of Muslims are looking for an alternative and will be voting for the Left-Congress alliance or the ISF in some pockets of south Bengal, even if not in large numbers,” he told The Wire.

In Murshidabad district and some South Bengal seats, several heavyweights are in the fray where Muslims can determine their fate.

This is the first of a two-part series on on Muslim voting in West Bengal.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is an independent journalist.

Can Congress Victory in Bengal Assembly Bypoll Have Any Larger Implications?

The victory of the Left-backed Congress candidate comes at the cost of both TMC and BJP’s vote share, and a warning to both the dominant forces.

Kolkata: In September 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s victory in the Basirhat Dakshin assembly constituency by-election, necessitated by eight-time CPI(M) MLA Narayan Mukhopadhyay’s death, had hinted at the larger trend of switching of traditional Left votes towards the BJP. In November 2019, the Trinamool Congress (TMC)’s victory in the assembly bypolls in Kaliaganj, Karimpur and Kharagpur had hinted at Mamata Banerjee’s success in recovering space lost to the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections held six months before. Now, does the Congress’s victory in the February 2023 by-election to the Sagardighi assembly constituency offer any such hint?

As the new Congress MLA Byron Biswas becomes only the second non-TMC, non-BJP MLA in the 294-seat assembly, no major implication is expected in the House. Politics, however, is primarily played outside the House.

Sagardighi in Murshidabad district of central Bengal has been a bastion of the TMC since 2011, with Subrata Saha winning three times on a trot. This is despite Murshidabad and neighbouring Malda – two of the state’s three Muslim-majority districts – being among the last districts to embrace the TMC. The districts remained Congress bastions, despite the TMC’s wholehearted poaching efforts, until the fear of the BJP’s rise from 2019 onwards started to consolidate Muslim votes in the TMC’s favour.

But Sagardighi, where Muslims make up 64% of the population, was an exception, where Saha enjoyed his own popularity. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the TMC secured 42% of the polled votes in this assembly segment, against BJP’s 23.4%, Congress’s 22.7% and CPI(M)’s 6.8%. In the 2021 assembly election, Saha polled 51%, while the BJP’s share stood at 24% and the Left-backed Congress candidate secured only 19.5%.

This time, the bypoll necessitated by Saha’s death saw a similar contest between the TMC, the BJP and the Left-backed Congress candidate. The TMC fielded the party’s Sagardighi block unit president, Debashis Banerjee, who also happened to be a distant relative to the chief minister. The BJP fielded Dilip Saha, who had come to the party from the TMC. The Congress fielded Byron Biswas, a political greenhorn from a local industrialist family and the Left decided to continue their ongoing partnership with the Congress and back their candidate.

To the TMC’s shock, Biswas won by a big margin of 22,986 votes, securing 47.35% of the polled votes. The TMC’s vote share dipped to 34.94% and the BJP’s to 13.94%.

If the rise of the Left-Congress partnership – it is formally not an ‘alliance’ but a seat-sharing understanding – as a formidable challenger to the TMC is a concern for the BJP, currently the TMC’s principal opponent, there are reasons also for the TMC to worry. The results reflect TMC’s loss of support in an area where Muslims dominate the demography. In 2021, the party had swept all such areas.

“The result hints at the breaking of the TMC-BJP binary in state politics. During 2019-2020, issues like the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) had helped consolidate Muslim votes in the TMC’s favour. It looks like a section of the Muslims has started feeling disenchanted with the TMC and getting out of the fear of BJP,” said political analyst Abdul Matin, an assistant professor at the department of international relations, Jadavpur University.

Matin felt that the trend, if reflected in larger spheres in the coming days, would expand the democratic space. “The voting pattern of the Bengali Muslims had become almost homogenous. Now there are hints of cracks on that homogeneity,” he told The Wire. The arrest and harassment of Indian Secular Front (ISF) leader Naushad Siddiqui also seemed to have created a sense of despair among Muslim voters over the TMC, he said.

Siddiqui, the sole non-TMC, non-BJP MLA in the Bengal assembly until Biswas’s victory, was arrested from an agitation in Kolkata in January and kept behind the bars for five weeks, until getting bail from the high court.

This is the first electoral setback for the TMC since returning to power with a thumping majority in 2021 and political observers feel that the victory is likely to rejuvenate the Left-Congress camp ahead of the panchayat elections due in a few months.

Representative image of people voting in West Bengal. Photo: PTI

Critics energised

At least, it immediately energised one of the chief minister’s bitterest critics, state Congress president and Lok Sabha MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who had Murshidabad as his bastion for two decades until the TMC ravaged it in the 2021 assembly election. The district with 22 assembly seats played a crucial role in the TMC’s return to power in 2021.

“The key message from Sagardighi is the busting of the myth of Mamata Banerjee’s invincibility,” Chowdhury announced after the results were out on March 2. “The TMC betrayed the Muslims. They know it. They are the BJP’s stooges. Muslims of India know it,” he alleged.

CPI(M) state secretary Md Salim almost echoed him, describing the result as a “victory over two evil forces”. “The people have started accepting and approving our efforts to unite all non-BJP, non-TMC forces. Now, to respect the people’s mandate, it is incumbent on the leadership of the Left, the Congress and other forces to unify against the TMC and the BJP,” Salim said.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee attributed the defeat to a “conspiracy” jointly hatched by the Left, the Congress and the BJP, alleging that the BJP and the Left had transferred their votes to the Congress. She, however, did not explain the dip in her own party’s vote share.

Chowdhury’s remarks and perhaps also his confident body language irked the chief minister so much that she went on to launch a personal attack on Chowdhury, who is also the leader of the Congress in Lok Sabha. “He is talking big. What would he say if I bring up his daughter’s suicide, his driver’s suicide? If I say it was a case of twin murder? I know a lot of things. Do not make me talk,” she said, while addressing journalists in Kolkata.

The Left and Congress leaders said that her reaction betrayed her nervousness. There can, indeed, be some implications for the TMC with regard to the coming panchayat elections. There is a sense that the elections need to be violence-free for the TMC to have a bright prospect in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Banerjee’s nephew and the party’s national general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, has repeatedly vowed to ensure a free and fair, violence-free electoral process. Turning the 2018 panchayat polls into a mockery bled the party heavily in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as voters took revenge on the TMC.

While reining in their grassroots-level leaders may, actually, be one of the TMC’s biggest internal challenges, a revived Left-Congress is only poised to make the challenge steeper.

According to columnist Udayan Bandyopadhyay, who teaches political science at Bangabasi College in Kolkata, the Sagardighi results happened as an outcome of multiple factors – from local issues like choice of candidates to larger issues.

“A section of Muslims evidently wanted to give a chance to the Congress but this doesn’t look threatening for the TMC yet. However, an energised Left-Congress camp can change equations in the opposition space and that should be a cause of concern for the BJP,” he said.

The panchayat elections are likely to give a clearer picture of the changing political equations, if any, especially if the state is bracing for three-corner contests in the coming elections.