The story behind BJP’s two-face strategy in Bengal

It may appear strange that even after being trounced in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, the now famous protest movement is still an issue for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal. However, it's important to note that it is not an issue for the whole party. It is an issue that, at the moment, is exclusive and alive only for Dilip Ghosh, the president of state BJP, while the rest seem to keep it at a distance.

What is behind the BJP move to approach the protests in a two-pronged manner? All signs seem to suggest that this is part of a strategy that the party has hit upon to tackle the urban voters’ lack of stomach for an out-and-out communal campaign. Let’s look at how it has gone about this.

The party’s long-time karyakarta, Dilip Ghosh, who has made it his political calling card to speak in a language that is crude but direct, is the BJP face in much of Bengal. Sample this recent statement of his: “Poor, uneducated men and women have been made to sit on roads. In return, they are receiving money every day. They are being fed biryani bought with foreign funds... Be it Delhi's Shaheen Bagh or Kolkata's Park Circus, the picture is the same everywhere.”

It does not require rocket science to understand why Ghosh is not shying away from exploiting the Shaheen Bagh issue even after it flopped miserably in Delhi. Unlike Arvind Kejriwal, Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee is committed to oppose the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to the bitter end. She has said publicly that she will stand with those protesting peacefully against these laws. Therefore, BJP has decided to try and reap the maximum benefit out of opposing her. It feels this may be the easiest way to advance the ‘Hindus-are-in-danger’ theory, which could find takers among a sizable section of Bengal’s Hindus, who make up 70 per cent of the state’s population.

But here is where things become more complex.

With the aggressive Dilip Ghosh in lead, BJP secured 18 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats (up by 16 seats compared to 2014) securing 40.25 per cent (+22.25 from 2014) votes. Still Mamata Banerjee’s TMC beat it with 22 seats (down by 12 seats) and 43.28 (+3.48) per cent vote share. One of the striking features of this election was BJP’s poor performance in densely populated Kolkata and its adjacent areas. It lost all the 7 seats (Kolkata Dakshin, Kolkata Uttar, Howrah, Dumdum, Barasat, Jadavpur and Diamond Harbour) of this region to TMC. Not only that, except for Dumdum everywhere the margin of loss was more than one lakh.

In fact, if another seven seats adjacent to the earlier seven are added (Barrackpur, Basirhat, Bangaon, Jaynagar, Mathurapur, Uluberia and Sreerampur), then out of 14 seats (exactly one-third of the total seats of Bengal) in the south-eastern region of Bengal, BJP got only two. So, to conquer Bengal in 2021, the Saffron party needs to dent this bastion of TMC.

For breaching, what we may call, Fort Kolkata, BJP is projecting an alternative, sober face in the form of Babul Supriyo. One of the reasons for BJP’s onslaught failing in and around Kolkata could be urban Bengal’s dislike for an aggressive, rural man like Ghosh. So, by projecting people like Babul Supriyo and other ‘moderate’ leaders in this region, (and by not announcing the name of the party’s chief ministerial candidate for 2021 Assembly election), BJP will try to persuade the voters of south Bengal that a moderate face will lead the government in Bengal if BJP wins.

But beyond the cluster of about 14 Lok Sabha seats (and 98 out of 294 seats), in the rest two-thirds of Bengal, it will be Dilip Ghosh who will lead the party in his style. Out of these 28 seats of north, central and south-western Bengal, BJP won 16 under his leadership (while TMC won 10 and Congress 2). The people in these regions seem to have no problem with a man who talks of answering violence of the ruling party with violence, who claims that that the milk of Indian cows contains gold, and who has sharp words for those in the anti-CAA movement.

It is this thinking of the BJP which was behind the divergent voices within the party on the anti-CAA protests. In mid-January, Suprio had countered Dilip Ghosh’s assertion that “Didi's police didn't take action against those who destroyed public property [after the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill] as they are her voters”. Ghosh had also said that BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Karnataka had “shot these people like dogs.” Supriyo openly contradicted him: “Yogi (Adityanath) has taken some very stringent, legal steps to deal with people who were involved in arson and destroyed public property, but no BJP government anywhere has shot people down in any manner whatsoever.” He added that Dilip Ghosh’s comment was not the party’s stand.

Now, what exactly was the party’s stand on this? The short answer is that it was never spelt out. The verbal duels may have project the image of a badly-divided house, but it also simultaneously gave the impression that some in the BJP were ‘cultured’ and some ‘uncultured’ and they were fighting for dominance.

This two-faced BJP will face its first test in April 2020, when most urban civic bodies across Bengal (103 corporations and municipalities) go for elections. The Saffron party lost by 3-0 the last time there was a by-election for three Assembly seats. It’s performance in April will be keenly watched and assessed.

It is only after that it will begin strategising for the 2021 Assembly election, which has slowly taken on the contours of a do-or-die battle for the BJP. As things stand, it seems BJP will have two faces for different regions of Bengal, without disclosing which one is the real face and which one the mask.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a Kolkata-based journalist and author of books including, A Naxal Story. He is a deputy editor at the Bengali daily, Aajkal)

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