The results of the local bodies elections — including at the rural panchayat level — in 17 West Bengal districts that went to the polls recently unmistakably suggest that the stranglehold of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress on the state is more or less complete, barring stray areas in southern Bengal and two districts in the north.
The CPI(M)-led Left Front, which had called the shots for over three decades until its ouster at the hands of the Trinamul Congress in 2011, now looks like a pale shadow of its old self. The Congress has weakened itself further. This makes it all too evident that Ms Banerjee firmly constitutes one pole in the electoral politics of her state.
What is more important, she no longer needs the Congress to be by her side to take on the once powerful Left. The election results in rural Bengal could not have been clearer. In the byelection for the Howrah Lok Sabha seat in June, the Trinamul Congress had scraped past the Congress by just a small margin, snatching away the seat. That was the first indication of the accretion in the Trinamul Congress’ clout. The panchayat results confirm this trend.
The election tricks — earlier mastered by the CPI(M) — are now the monopoly of Ms Banerjee’s party. On that basis, it can be said after the recent panchayat results that the Trinamul Congress will be the favourite in the Lok Sabha election next year, and can afford to take on the Left and the Congress simultaneously.
The rules of the game will be somewhat different in the parliamentary election as it will be closely monitored by the Election Commission and the Trinamul Congress’ muscle-flexers and “scientific riggers” will have to be on their guard. But this is unlikely to crease Ms Banerjee’s brow. Her two key opponents — the Left and the Congress — are both virtually leaderless. Quite plainly, the Bengali voter has no alternative for now.
In controlling and calibrating election-time violence, the Trinamul Congress has beaten the Left at its own game. If candidates of parties opposing Trinamul couldn’t even file their nomination papers in as many as 15 per cent of seats in the panchayat election, the cynic might say this is not news in West Bengal.
For some time, elections have been won in the state, but democracy has been on the losing spree for long. Ms Banerjee has not lived up to her promise of “paribartan”, or change. She was voted in to clean up the Augean stables. Instead, she has beaten the erstwhile Left governments at their own game and conducted the poll battles with the help of “mastans” (local hoodlums) who have simply transferred their allegiance to the Trinamul Congress.