Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), the most significant urban body of Eastern India, went to polls on 19 December 2021. The ruling party of the state, All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), was the favourite to win the elections from the beginning after their landslide victory in 2021 Assembly Elections and the subsequent bypolls.
Results were on expected lines. AITC bagged 134 wards, BJP was reduced to 3 wards, Left and INC both got 2 wards each, and Independents won 3 wards. This was the most one-sided election in the history of KMC where there is no recognised opposition party.
BJP Left the Battlefield Before the War
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ran one of the most expensive political campaigns of recent times before the 2021 West Bengal State Assembly General Elections, held in April-May this year. The party's rank and file were confident of a resounding victory. Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding several rallies in the state also reinstated that confidence.
However, the electoral defeat of the BJP seemed to have broken the confidence of its workers, coupled with the subsequent whitewash in the bypolls.
Kolkata is a well-known TMC fortress. In the last 21 years, they have been running the KMC for 16 years. Even during the Left Front regime, TMC defeated them in Kolkata in the 2000 and 2010 elections. According to the 2021 Assembly General Elections, TMC led in 132 of the 144 wards in KMC.
Very few people believed that the TMC could be ousted and thus, many anti-TMC voters decided not to step outside their house on a pleasant Sunday winter afternoon.
BJP ran an assiduous campaign two months ago for the bypolls. But for the KMC polls, they didn't put as much effort as they did for the Assembly elections. Their star campaigners were absent and so were most workers and supporters. This may be due to a lack of support from the leadership during the post-poll violence against BJP workers.
This lustreless campaign of the principal opposition party resulted in the most unenthusiastic KMC election for many decades. Ultimately, BJP won only three wards (down from 7 in 2015) and got nearly nine percent votes (down from 15 percent in 2015). Despite having 18 MPs and 75 official MLAs in the state the BJP has reached an all-time low since 2014 which can be illustrated from the following chart.
Sense of Disbelief in BJP
Sukanta Majumdar, Member of Parliament from Balurghat, was made the BJP State President after BJP's defeat in Assembly Polls, amidst party infighting. Since then, the party lost 7 seats in the bypolls.
For the KMC polls, he was out of the campaign scene for a long time and the BJP campaigned ambitiously only for the last three to four days. Some media reports claimed that Majumdar thought the KMC Elections were beneath the stature of a BJP State President.
Sukanta Majumdar and other prominent State BJP leaders like Suvendu Adhikari or Dilip Ghosh were busy in Singur, which marked the commencement of land movement in West Bengal 15 years ago. The BJP claimed to have taken up the cause of farmers in Singur, but they could not convey their message to the masses effectively.
The party leadership camping in Singur, 40 km away from Kolkata, did not sit well with BJP workers in the city as they felt deserted.
A sense of disbelief prevailed, which set a bad example and it seemed like the BJP had already given up on the battle. BJP workers understood this.
Some BJP candidates publicly acknowledged that workers were demanding money to attend party's meetings.
Senior BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Roopa Ganguly supporting a rebel BJP candidate and veteran BJP leader and ex-Governor of Meghalaya, Tathagata Roy publicly claiming BJP formulated a monetary barter system in KMC elections made it difficult for them to revive from the loss of the assembly and bypolls.
BJP Failed to Gauge the Pulse of Kolkata
There are almost 40 percent non-Bengali voters in Kolkata, and this group of voters have been firmly behind the BJP in the last few elections, excluding the Urdu speaking people.
Still, the All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC) was able to get a 57 percent vote share in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area and the vote share of AITC in Kolkata District was 61 percent in the 2021 Assembly Elections. This time in the KMC election TMC’s vote share reached 72 percent, breaking previous records.
This indicated that TMC was getting more than 60 percent of the Bengali Hindu votes. The BJP, on the other hand, failed to attract the Bengali speaking population in Kolkata.
The primary reason behind this could be the politics of Bengali nationalism by the AITC, where they pitched it around the 'Bengali vs Outsider' debate. It was easy for the AITC to brand BJP as an 'outsider' and alien to the Bengali community as the star campaigners of the latter spoke primarily in Hindi with the notable exception of Smriti Irani.
Instances of prominent state and national level leaders, making false comments like "Rabindranath Tagore was born at Santiniketan", gave a ‘culture shock’ to the Bengalis, which made the situation worse for BJP.
But the BJP did not change its approach and were still banking on the non-Bengali voters to pull them through. It became clear when BJP fielded Priyanka Tibrewal from Bhowanipore, who is not a voter from that constituency.
In the KMC election, the party had fielded 40 percent non-Bengali candidates. They failed to counter the Bengali nationalistic narrative of AITC, but instead, they fell into the trap and failed to remove the tag of 'Bohiragoto' (Outsider) that the TMC kept placing upon them.
Opposition Didn’t Let BJP Control the Narrative
While the BJP was busy pushing Hindu-Muslim debates and alleging North Korea style of governance in Bengal and making personal attacks on the Chief Minister, the AITC stuck to the fundamental bread and butter issues. The Left targeted them on the specific issues like lack of employment opportunities.
All the candidates and leaders of the AITC and Left devoted maximum time of their speeches to issues like price hike of petrol diesel and LPG, and unemployment.
As seen in previous elections, these were the issues that mattered over the politics of polarization. Both AITC and Left didn't let BJP take control of the narrative.
Changing Political Equations in Bengal?
The Left Front and the Indian National Congress decided to contest on their own respectively in the KMC elections after their massive defeat together (along with Indian Secular Front) in the 2021 Assembly Elections where they won zero seats individually.
Following their defeat, both Left and the Congress changed their strategy and contested individually, which helped them grab a combined 16 percent vote share in KMC. Left with almost 12 percent vote share stood second, replacing BJP (9.2 percent) as a principal opposition in the KMC. The Indian National Congress grabbed 4.1 percent of votes in the KMC elections.
The Kolkata Municipal Elections show that the people of Kolkata chose the Left over BJP as the opposition in KMC.
The results are a warning for BJP to change its strategy in Bengal in the run-up to the upcoming Corporations and Municipality elections.
At the same time, it is an opportunity for the Left and Congress to use this chance to bring back their golden days in Bengal politics.
Though the detailed ward wise results have not been released at the time of publishing this article, but one can opine that the increase in their vote shares can also be attributed to individual performances of of Santosh Pathak (INC) or Madhuchanda Deb (CPI).
We should keep in mind that the Left’s vote share came down in the urban seats of Bhowanipore and Khardah in the bypolls. It was only Santipur where they gained riding on the popularity of the candidate. Same goes for Congress, they lost votes in Santipur but could gain in Samserganj due to candidate’s popularity.
The Left needs to continue this upward trend in upcoming Municipality elections in 114 Municipalities and 6 Municipal Corporations if they want to dislodge BJP as the opposition.
TMC Misses a Golden Opportunity
As the results were predictable, AITC could have avoided the unwanted violence and attack on the opposition candidates. This would have been a golden opportunity for the party to recover its image from the 2018 Panchayat elections, keeping in mind the broader aim of entry to national politics.
Repeated warnings given by AITC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee didn't work and instances of rigging, violence and intimidation prevailed.
Impact on State and National Politics
It will be far-fetched to say that KMC Election results will have an impact on national politics but it will surely strengthen the TMC in the state. The KMC results will definitely have an impact on upcoming Corporation and Municipality elections across Bengal.
Left Front replaced BJP as the main Opposition in terms of vote share. Left could only win two wards but they came second in almost 65 wards while the BJP came second in almost 45 wards most of which were in the non-Bengali areas. It will be interesting to see if the Left Front can continue this performance in upcoming Municipality elections.
West Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha constituencies and AITC is eyeing 40+ Lok Sabha seats from the state. Even if TMC bags more than 35 seats from Bengal, it could make them the third most prominent force in the Parliament after BJP and INC. They are now at their peak in West Bengal.
People are leaving BJP in large numbers. If this trend continues, it will create confusion among anti-TMC voters which may in-turn help the Left revive in the state.
(Spandan Roy Basunia is a student at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Sumanta Roy is a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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