Farm Bills become Mamata Banerjee’s new weapon against BJP

The recently passed contentious Farm Bills have provided West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee a new weapon against the BJP. She has been going all out against the Bills with the aim of labeling BJP as “anti-farmer.”

This becomes evident if one looks at her comments after the Bills were passed. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo not only alleged that the Bills will result in farmer suicides, and also accused the Centre of passing them “to loot” farmers. The reason behind her scathing attack against the saffron party is to rally the rural population in West Bengal - a significant section of whom are involved in agriculture - behind her against the BJP. At least 60% of voters in the state live in rural areas and are the deciding factor in elections.

She has also instructed her party to hit the streets against the Farm Bills and pressed the youth, students’, women’s and agricultural labourers’ organisations into service. TMC sources revealed that the party is keen on making most of the issue and use it as a counter to blunt BJP’s polarization tactics.

This will likely be a cause of concern for BJP as she had used similar strategy focusing on farmers’ interest to dislodge the CPI(M)-led Left Front from power in Bengal in 2011. Spearheading land agitations at Singur and Nandigram she ate into the rural vote base of the CPI(M) by successfully convincing farmers that the party was no longer their friend.

It is unlikely this time tested strategy of the TMC supremo will yield no results against BJP, which even after winning 18 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, is still far from achieving the level of organisational clout which kept CPI(M) in power for more than three decades.

Sensing trouble, the BJP has decided to launch a state-wide campaign on the benefits of the Farm Bills, with a special focus on rural areas.