BJP increases vote share in Bengal three-fold
In the ‘TsuNamo' of seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party has won in this general election, it is easy to miss the two it has bagged in West Bengal. But look closely at the voting trends and you will find a promising tale of the BJP's growing footprint in West Bengal. First, the party has secured an impressive 17 per cent of the vote share in the State. This is its best performance in West Bengal till date. The score is not only a tremendous improvement on the party's 2009 performance when it had got just about six per cent of the vote share, but is also significantly better than its previous best score of 13 per cent which was recorded in 1991. Second, apart from the two seats that the party won in Darjeeling and Asansol, it finished second in three others: Kolkata North, Kolkata South and Maldaha South. And all these battles were closely contested in and around the 15,000-vote margin. Third, the widespread impact of the BJP's performance in Bengal becomes crystal clear when one breaks down the numbers from lok Sabha constituencies into their Assembly segments. The BJP had the lead in 24 Assembly segments and the second lead in 25 others.
These numbers show how the party, which has had a negligible presence in the State for decades, is fast catching up with the established players — the ruling Trinamool Congress, the left parties and the Congress. Of these, the Congress had ceased to be a major challenging force in West Bengal long before it was decimated nationwide. The left Front was washed out in the State Assembly in 2011 by Ms Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, and is yet to recover from that debilitating defeat. The Trinamool Congress is the most formidable political force in Bengal as of now. The party, which already has full control of the State Assembly, will now have 34 MPs in the lok Sabha. To what extent the BJP is able to take on the Trinamool Congress will depend on two factors: How the governance records of the two parties shape up at the top leadership level and how effectively the BJP is able to establish its network at the grassroots level. In the first case, Ms Banerjee's mercurial temperament has already eroded her goodwill; her pre-poll antagonism towards Mr Narendra Modi also did not sit well with many. In the second case, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's increased presence in the State over the past three years — it has opened more than 700 shakhas in north Bengal and another 280 in the south — is indicative of the ground-level work already in progress. These efforts will be gauged during the upcoming Kolkata municipal poll, while the big test will be 2016 Assembly election. Critics may say that the Right agenda has never had many takers in Bengal, but they must remember the roles of Syama Prasad Mookerjee and NC Chatterjee, founders of the the BJP’s parent organisation, the Jan Sangh, and also Tapan Sikdar and Satyabrata Mukherjee, both tall BJP leaders from the State.