Mamata relies on welfare beneficiaries amid BJP's attempts cash in on anti-incumbency

“You can trust a poisonous snake, but you cannot trust the BJP,” Mamata Banerjee says, pacing the podium in her inimitable style. With the crowd at a rally in Cooch Behar cheering intermittently, the chief minister of West Bengal goes ballistic against the party in power at the Centre, attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government for blocking funds for the development and welfare schemes in the state.

"The BJP is destroying the country," she says, criticising the saffron party, which has emerged as the principal challenger to her Trinamool Congress, raising its Lok Sabha seats from the state from just one in 2009 and two in 2014 to 18 in 2019 and vote share from just 6.1 per cent to 40.6 per cent in just 10 years.

With West Bengal no longer a Terra Invictus for it, the BJP is now trying to ride on the anti-incumbency wave against the TMC to win more seats from the state and reach closer to its national target of 'Aab Ki Bar 400 Paar'. Modi is leading the party’s campaign, harping more on the allegations of corruption against the TMC leaders than on Hindutva.

"The TMC orchestrates attacks on central agencies to shield its extortionist and corrupt leaders,” the prime minister says in a rally in the same constituency a few hours later, referring to the January 5 assault on the Enforcement Directorate’s officials at Sandeshkhali in the North 24 Parganas district during a raid on the TMC strongman Sheikh Shahjahan in connection with a ration scam. He promises to return to the people the money seized by the central agencies during raids on the TMC leaders.

Banerjee, however, is pinning her hope on the series of welfare schemes her government has launched after coming to power in 2011. The schemes created her own ‘labharthi varg’ that she is now relying on to blunt the anti-incumbency wave. She slams Modi for misusing the central agencies against the TMC leaders to ensure political advantage for the BJP ahead of the polls.

But, before she leaves the podium, Banerjee also accuses the Congress and the CPM of colluding with the BJP against the TMC. "We are the ones who are fighting against the BJP. Don’t cast a single vote for the Congress and the CPM if you want to defeat the BJP," she says, sending out a message to the minority community. She also warns the Matuas, a Hindu community that migrated from erstwhile East Pakistan to West Bengal, against falling into the ‘trap’ the BJP-led central government allegedly laid with the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Though the TMC insists that it remains part of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, Banerjee never fails to drive home the point that her party has no alliance with any of the constituents of the opposition bloc in any of the 42 parliamentary seats in West Bengal.

The Congress’s Lok Sabha seats from West Bengal decreased from six in 2009 to just two in 2019 and vote share plummeted from 13.5 per cent to just 5.6 per cent during the same period. The TMC, which retained 43.3 per cent votes despite losing to the BJP in as many as 18 LS constituencies in 2019, didn’t see any electoral benefit in a tie-up with the Congress that has at the helm of its state unit Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, one of the staunchest and most persistent critics of the TMC and its supremo.

The CPM's vote percentage, too, nosedived from 33.1 per cent in 2009 to 6.3 per cent in 2019, when the party failed to win any Lok Sabha seat from the state. Banerjee had in 2011 led the TMC to end the Left Front’s 34-year-long rule in West Bengal. She naturally had no interest in getting into an electoral understanding with the leftists, who could not win any seat in the Assembly in the 2021 state polls. Any move to help the CPM and its allies revive in West Bengal would have demoralised her party’s leaders and workers.

Besides, a revived Congress and the CPM making a dent in her party’s minority vote bank is the last thing the TMC chief would want, as the community, accounting for 27 per cent of the state’s population, could be a deciding factor in at least 15 LS constituencies in the state. The Congress and the CPM, however, allege that the BJP used the central probe agencies to force the TMC to make sure that the I.N.D.I.A. parties do not fight together in West Bengal.

The Congress and the CPM finally managed to have an electoral understanding, despite resistance from other leftist parties. The CPM’s talks with the Indian Secular Front, however, did not go well, and the new party, which has a considerable support base among the minority community in certain pockets of the state, decided to go solo.