As the year draws to a close and the new a single opens, with assembly poll battles in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, the BJP is once again in direct, unending conflict with regional parties.
Since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 and returned with an even a bigger mandate, the part of Amit Shah as the chief strategist for the BJP’s juggernaut has been a lot talked about by these parties.
In 2020, Modi propelled the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to win the Bihar polls and enabled ally Janata Dal(United) leader Nitish Kumar to make it to a fourth term. Also, in a sort of sweep of the assembly by-elections in seven out of 11 states, the BJP or its ally won 41 of the 59 seats. Of these seats, 31 had been at the expense of the Congress, as its top rated leadership nevertheless seems to be recovering from the 2019 parliamentary polls.
The Rajya Sabha polls also showed the BJP taking its quantity in the Upper House to 111, seats as compared to Congress’s 65.
Multiple rallies
As an indicator of factors to come in 2021, Home Minister Amit Shah held a number of rallies in Bengal on December 19 and 20, exactly where he targeted the Mamata Banerjee government more than the law and order scenario.
Ever due to the fact the BJP shocked Mamata and other “secular” parties by winning 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal in the 2019 parliamentary polls, its rank and file have been swelling in the name of fighting the “misrule” in the state below Mamata Banerjee due to the fact 2011, when she came to energy by displacing the 33-year-old of the Marxists on a equivalent plank.
Shah has promised to be back in Bengal in January once again for a repeat of December 19-20, when quite a few Trinamool Congress rebels, which includes celebration heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari, joined the BJP.
Of course, taken aback by the effect of Shah’s forays, Mamata Banerjee has accused Shah of speaking untruths on the improvement of the state, describing the figures provided by him on several parameters as “garbage of lies.”
His blitzkrieg has won headlines for the BJP, just after his claim that the BJP would win Bengal with a 200-seat victory.
Chief poll strategist
Not to be outdone, Mamata’s hired chief strategist Prashant Kishor has shed his inhibitions (about coming into the limelight in the interest of his consumers) to pooh-pooh Shah’s claims publicly in several interviews. Kishor has declared that he will quit his profession if the BJP is in a position to cross double digits in the 294-seat sturdy assembly.
As we know, Kishor’s claim to fame is that he when worked for Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, then for Nitish Kumar in the assembly polls in Bihar in 2015, Rahul Gandhi in UP in 2017 and for the Shiv Sena in 2019.
Kishor is on a mission to reduce the BJP to size wherever and anytime elections are held, to avenge the souring of his ties with the saffron celebration due to the fact 2014. For some inexplicable purpose, he chose not to take the challenge in Bihar seriously in this year’s election. His a single time-client, Nitish Kumar, chose to go back to the BJP-fold in 2017.
Currently, Kishor has been hired by Mamata, as properly as DMK chief M K Stalin, to enable them win their respective elections. His teams are at work in Kolkata and Chennai, sifting via heaps of information to come u with a victory formula for each the leaders. Kishor is close to Mamata’s nephew-MP Abhishek Banerjee and Stalin’s son Udhayanidhi and son-in-law Sabarisan, who are handling their respective parties’ tactics and poll management.
Daunting job
It is in Bengal that Kishor’s job seems to be fairly daunting. By all accounts, Mamata appears she is fighting large anti-incumbency troubles with her back to the wall— largely on account of quite a few omissions and commissions of her regime, which has earned notoriety for a cycle of political extortions, reduce cash and operation of “syndicates” by Trinamool Congress leaders amid the senseless killings of opposition leaders and workers. The BJP alone has had more than 130 of its ranks getting killed by the goons of the ruling celebration.
Fear is writ massive on the faces of Bengal’s political workers as old timers recall how the state had noticed equivalent violence when the Congress was on the decline, just before the Marxists came to energy in 1977.
Mamata herself, and her fledgling celebration also, had faced equivalent therapy from the CPI(M) strongmen when the Left was on decline just before the 2011 polls. Ironically, she is forced to defend her government’s handling of political violence.
Not just in Kolkata but in the vast swathes of rural Bengal, Mamata does not have a lot of a governance record that she can be proud of. Her detractors claim she lost interest to govern just after her win in the 1st term.
Mamata’s supply of strength in the elections has largely been the minority, who make up for 30 per cent of all voters. Therefore, it is not surprising that the BJP has worked more than the years to convert Bengal’s cultural Hindu mindset into a political force.
Muslim vote
After the Lok Sabha polls of 2019, the BJP showed it had gained the self-assurance of a quantity of voters who had been when the supporters of the Left since of their antipathy towards Mamata.
Be that as it might, Kishor has revealed in interviews that the BJP can not effortlessly dislodge the Trinamool Congress since of the Muslim voters (who are a element in more than 120 assembly segments). For the Bengal Hindu vote, the BJP would have to compete tough with Mamata and attempt to accomplish a larger strike than it has hitherto shown in other states. That is not effortlessly achievable in nine Muslim-influenced districts, which includes 24 North Parganas, Hooghly, Nadia, Murshidabad, South 24 Parganas, Paschim Bardhaman, Paschim Medinipur, Purba Medinipur and Howrah.
Modi might have his appeal as the harbinger of improved governance compared to Mamata’s, concedes Kishor. But her celebration has been steadily infusing new blood amongst its ranks, forcing numerous seniors and old faces to shift to the BJP.
As Kishor operates to settle individual scores with Shah, the battle for Bengal promises to be the mother of all electoral battles in 2021. For the BJP, wresting the state from the Trinamool Congress will be akin to an achievement like the undoing of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, for which Jan Sangh mentor and Bengal’s proud son Syama Prasad Mookerjee had paid with his life.
The writer is a former Senior Associate Editor of Hindustan Times and Political Editor of Deccan Herald, New Delhi.