The last byelection in three assembly seats this month was a disaster for West Bengal BJP with all three going to Trinamool Congress. The Saffron party could not retain the seat of its state party president who has been elected to Lok Sabha this year, as a result of that his Kharagpur seat was left vacant.
The Kaliagunj assembly seat—traditionally held by Congress—was left vacated by the death of its legislator. However, in the Lok Sabha election, six months back, BJP took a massive 57,000 leads and won the Raigunj seat. It lost this time by a narrow margin of over 2,000 votes. Like Kaliagunj, another bordering seat Karimpur also went to Trinamool Congress.
The saffron party sat down after the 3-0 defeat and came to know that it would be blunder for them to raise the slogan in favour of NRC unless the citizenship amendment bill is passed by the parliament.
Dilip Ghosh, Bengal BJP president, told Malayala Manorama: “TMC campaigned negatively against us on NRC across three seats. Now we have decided to talk on NRC only after ensuring citizenship for the Hindus.”
The bill is now passed by parliament.
There are around 105 seats out of 294 seats in West Bengal where Muslim votes either is in majority or matter a lot. BJP is planning to consolidate the Hindu votes in these constituencies using the pro-Muslim image of chief minister Mamata Banerjee. The polarisation tricks has worked well for them in last Lok Sabha election.
Advised by Prashant Kishore, Mamata, however, has been trying to shrug off that image and trying hard to become an acceptable face for majority and minorities both. However, after the Ayodha Verdict, the minority vote bank, Congress and left had, totally shifted to Mamata Banerjee if last three assembly byelection results are taken into consideration.
Mamata knows that 2021 assembly election would not be fought on the basis of her work (positive or negative), issues of corruption but on the basis of consolidation of Hindu votes. Citizenship amendment bill is something on which BJP is trying to bank on heavily.
However, there is no guarantee that the bill to give citizenship to refugees would help large number of people in the state. Primarily this is because most of the refugees who crossed over to Bengal after 1971, being religiously persecuted, have been given voter rights, ration cards and even Aadhar cards. However, many of them even today have not been given land rights as they are living in the government vested land.
Mamata Banerjee has silently started giving people the land rights and many of them are even Muslims.
So BJP is seeing that in the coming days the government needs to start the process of NRC like it was carried out in Assam. In Assam the process of NRC also started with updation of voter list. Any person, who was found to be accused as a foreigner, by the investigator, would be dropped out of the voter list. More than 40 lakh people did not vote in Assam in last election despite them having documents. Ninety percent of them were Muslims.
Once the NRC would be drafted in the state, along with whole country, there would be plenty of yardstick and documents one would have to submit. The prime is legacy data through which one would have to establish that his or her parents were in the voter list of the country before 1971.
“There is a huge demographic changes took place in Bengal since partition which continued till 1998 when our first government came to power. Muslim entered Bengal for economic reasons and Hindus entered Bengal after being persecuted by Jamaat e Islami in Bangladesh. If we do the calculation the Muslims ventured into Bengal for economic reasons outnumbers the Hindus entered into our state. We need to drive out people who entered because of economic purpose,” said Biswapriya Roychowdhury, state vice president of BJP, indicating that the party would portray NRC in this way in the 2021 election.
The left and Congress are united and decided to launch a massive protest against NRC. However, they declined to be part of the larger coalition involving Trinamool Congress.
“Left and we will do our things together. TMC is in the same league as of BJP in Bengal,” said Pradip Bhattacharya, Rajya Sabha MP of Congress.
TMC said it does not require the support of Congress and left.
“People of Bengal have voted in favour of us in the past. You will see in the coming election as well that cutting across religious line they would vote for us,” said Partha Chatterjee, secretary general of TMC.
Question is if BJP could polarise last Lok Sabha election without Citizenship amendment bill and can win 18 seats, can TMC block the saffron surge by scaring people against NRC?
Time will tell.
