In a Personality-Driven Campaign, It was Mamata Versus the Rest

The CPI(M) leadership must introspect why Left parties were uprooted in their home turf, writes Arati R Jerath.

West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee waves at supporters after her party’s thumping win in the state assembly elections, in Kolkata on Thursday. (Photo: PTI)

The woman of the match in the just concluded round of assembly polls is clearly West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. She battled a relentless 24x7 negative media campaign, a deadly sting operation, a corruption scandal near her doorstep and formidable alliance arithmetic on the other side to sweep back to power with stunning numbers.

How many incumbent CMs can boast of winning more seats in their second term than they bagged when they first caught public imagination as the harbinger of change? Mamata has defied all odds to do just that.

There are three main reasons for her mind blowing performance:

1) Personal Appeal

One is her personal appeal. Despite five years in office, she has not lost her emotional connect with people. Mamata remains Didi for the vast majority of the poor, both urban and rural. The intellectuals who powered her victory five years ago may have deserted her but the support for her was as strong as ever in the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

2) Development Card

The second is her development efforts, patchy as they are. Her administrative record leaves much to be desired. But in a state used to receiving mere crumbs from a party that had ruled with an iron hand for 34 years, even ad hoc development Mamata-style proved to be a boon.

A smattering of roads in areas forgotten by Left leaders comfortably ensconced in Kolkata’s Writer’s Building, free cycles for school going children, money gifts for girls at 18 and regular electricity, albeit at the cost of losing industry to other parts of the country helped create a feel good factor to offset any anti-incumbency that may have crept in.

3) Personality-Driven Campaign

Most importantly, none of the corruption scandals around which, her opponents built their campaign touched her personally. While voters were ready to believe the worst about her party leaders, Mamata remained untainted in their eyes.

So when she asked for votes for herself as the Trinamool candidate in all 294 seats, people did just that. They voted for Mamata Banerjee as chief minister. It was as successful a personality-driven campaign as the one Narendra Modi ran in 2014 when he sought votes as the next Prime Minister.

Pathological Hatred for Left

But another narrative has emerged from Mamata’s overwhelming performance. In her success lies the story of the Left’s abject failure to resurrect itself in its former bastion. The numbers speak for themselves.

The Left, which had ruled Bengal for 34 uninterrupted years, has won fewer seats than even the Congress which was its junior partner in a hastily cobbled arrangement aimed at defeating Mamata through pure arithmetic. In the end, the arithmetic collapsed as the Left came a poor third to teeter dangerously on the verge of extinction in what was once considered a Marxist hub.

The CPI (M) will have to do some serious soul-searching to understand the reasons for its debacle. But a quick trip through parts of West Bengal gave an inkling of what was wrong. With no fresh blood to energise it, no charismatic leader to challenge Mamata’s dominant personality and no programme of action to pull Bengal out of its moribund poverty and low level development, the Left was doomed from the beginning.

Voters saw the CPI (M) as “a party of old men’’, as several youths put it. And for every allegation their leaders threw at Mamata – corruption, syndicate raj, daily violence and extortion by TMC thugs – people had just one response. “The CPI(M) started it.’’

It is difficult to shake off memories of 34 years of misrule and it is clear that the people of Bengal are not ready to take back the Left yet. And unless it reinvents itself, the CPI(M) may be reduced to a footnote in Bengal’s political history.

Although Left leaders in the state consistently maintained that an alliance with the Congress was the call of the people, they had clearly misread the popular mood. In fact, the near rejection of the Left suggests that its voters were unhappy with the decision to join hands with a party it had fought for more than four decades, often with violent consequences.

A view of the Congress’ headquarters in New Delhi on Thursday following the results of the assembly elections. (Photo: PTI)

Mamata Reigns Supreme

• Didi’s unprecedented victory can be explained on the basis of a personality-driven campaign, where on the lines of Modi versus the rest in 2014, people in Bengal chose Mamata in 2016.
  
• Mamata’s victory is a wake-up call for the Left that is in dire need of restructuring in order to win people’s confidence.
  
• Left suffered a jolt in its home turf due to lack of a charismatic leader in comparison to Mamata and a violent past that haunts the party even today.
  
• Congress will have to reconsider its choice of alliance partner in Bengal, for its defeat is a clear rejection of tie-up with the Left.
  

Possibility of Congress-Trinamool Alliance?

Ironically, the Congress managed to hold on to its fortresses in north Bengal by winning almost as many seats as it won in 2011. But Rahul Gandhi will also have to answer searching questions from within because he was the one who pushed for the alliance with the CPI(M). In the process, he has virtually shut the door on a future understanding with Mamata who will be formidable player on the national stage now after her stunning victory.

In forging what voters clearly saw as an unholy alliance between ideological opponents, the Left and Congress turned the 2016 campaign into a single issue election. Voters were asked to decide whether they were with Mamata or against her. A sharply polarised election tends to go in one direction. The people of Bengal have given a thunderous response.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)

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