In West Bengal, BJP caught in a low-level equilibrium trap

As the counting for the bypolls held on June 19 proceeded, it became clear early on that the Trinamool Congress (TMC) was going to win the Kaliganj Assembly seat in West Bengal’s Nadia district. It held the seat with a bigger share of the vote compared to 2021.

When it became clear that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was going to lose yet another bypoll in West Bengal — the TMC has won all 11 since the 2021 Assembly elections — Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP Leader of the Opposition, underlined his party’s sectarian agenda, saying his party had received a vast majority of the Hindu vote. ‘Our aim was to consolidate the Hindu votes, which I believe we were quite successful in doing, in terms of strategy,’ he claimed.

Before we unpack the numbers, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the BJP ran its usual divisive campaign. The ball was set rolling on May 29, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking in Alipurduar district, sought to make political capital of Operation Sindoor and repeated the tired clichés about appeasement in the context of the disturbances in Malda and Murshidabad districts.

Visiting Kolkata on June 1, Union Home Minister Amit Shah ran with Modi’s line, trying to capitalise on Operation Sindoor and raising the bogey of appeasement and vote-bank politics. It was left to BJP Bengal president Sukanta Majumdar to bare the party’s fangs. ‘I can see thousands of worker … They will carry out Operation Bengal, like Operation Sindoor,’ he said on May 29. The crassness of the suggested equivalence, made in Modi’s presence, and its unmissable communal overtones set the tone inevitably, as we have seen, for another divisive campaign.

As far as majoritarian consolidation goes, the BJP has clearly hit a brick wall in West Bengal. Its numbers have been falling steadily since the high point of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Let’s look at the data. In 2019, led by Dilip Ghosh, the BJP got a massive spike. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) was complicit in sabotaging its own interests so that the BJP could make a windfall harvest — and there was the Pulwama factor. The BJP’s vote share went up from 17% and two seats in 2014 to almost 41% and 18 seats.

In the wake of this success, the BJP began experiencing severe faction-fighting, mainly between old party workers and opportunist entrants with substantial power — like Adhikari. That Ghosh, the party’s most credible organiser, was marginalised, speaks volumes.

Electorally, it’s been downhill for the saffron brigade. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it won 12 seats, with a vote percent of 38.73, a fall of almost 2%. But the past few Assembly polls also tell a story of decline. In 2016, the BJP really announced its presence in West Bengal. Under Ghosh’s leadership, its seat tally went up to six from two, while its vote percentage went up to double figures — almost 11%, up 5.76%. In the 2021 Assembly polls, it made a quantum jump — picking up 77 seats, with a vote share of 38.15%. This was a marked fall, however, from the 2019 elections. If you want to argue that Assembly results cannot be compared to Lok Sabha results, see the 2024 results again and clock the 2% fall.

The point is that the BJP’s relentless polarisation strategy doesn’t work everywhere. Let’s look at the Kaliganj results to wrap up this discussion. Despite a sharp fall in turnout, Alifa Ahmed, the newbie TMC candidate, polled a higher share of the vote than her father had — 55.15% as against 53.35% four years ago. Even the Congress-Left combine registered an uptick: 15.21% against the 11.98% it got in 2021.

The BJP lost support — down to 52,710 from 64,709 in 2021 in absolute terms and 28.29 from 30.91 in terms of vote share. It is in this context that Adhikari’s sweeping generalisation must be tested. Kaliganj has 248,358 voters, of whom 72.5% voted on June 19. That means approximately 180,060 people voted. Of them, we know 28.29% voted for the BJP, a total of 52,710 votes.

Kalgan’s critical demographics are as follows: It has over 132,000 Hindu voters, of whom 52,710 voted for the BJP, if only Hindus voted for them. At any rate, if the voting percentage applies across the board with regard to the entire population, no more than 70% of Hindus voted for the BJP.

Chasing majoritarian consolidation, the BJP finds itself caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, which it won’t break out of unless it realises that all of India doesn’t necessarily think like Gujarat and the north Indian hinterland.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.