In the midst of a war of words be­tween In­dian Home Min­is­ter Amit Shah and Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi on one side and Tri­namool Con­gress chief and in­cum­bent Chief Min­is­ter Mamta Baner­jee on the other, the bravado of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party is vis­i­ble. Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst and ob­server Ku­mar San­jay Singh, ar­gues that there are enough point­ers that de­spite their well-oiled elec­tion ma­chine, the Cooch Be­har vi­o­lence fol­low­ing in­ternecine fac­tion­al­ism, the party may still eat hum­ble pie when re­sults pour in for the multi-round West Ben­gal polls.

IT WOULD NOT BE AN EX­AG­GER­A­TION to sug­gest that Modi and Shah have re­de­fined the art of elec­tion­eer­ing in In­dian pol­i­tics. Their sin­gle-minded pur­suit of elec­toral vic­tory, metic­u­lous plan­ning to ex­pand BJP’s so­cial and ge­o­graph­i­cal base through or­ga­ni­za­tional al­liances and so­cial en­gi­neer­ing, and fi­nally the mi­cro­man­age­ment of elec­tions down to the booth level, have not been wit­nessed be­fore. The duo is now faced with the hour of reck­on­ing in the West Ben­gal and As­sam as­sem­bly elec­tion 2021.

Amit Shah and Modi have pub­licly ridiculed Mamta Baner­jee’s let­ter to a sec­tion of the op­po­si­tion par­ties high­light­ing the cur­rent as­sem­bly elec­tion as a wa­ter­shed mo­ment for In­dian democ­racy. How­ever, both of them un­der­stand the sin­gu­lar po­lit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of as­sem­bly elec­tions in West Ben­gal and As­sam. The re­sult of these two elec­tions will have a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on the BJP’s ef­fort to ex­pand in the east­ern and north­east­ern states of In­dia. A move that has ac­quired an ur­gency with the ex­pected ero­sion of BJP’s sup­port in North and west­ern In­dia.

BJP’s po­lit­i­cal style is founded on mas­cu­line chest-thump­ing. The claim of hav­ing a 56 inches chest by Naren­dra Modi, ac­quires so­cio-po­lit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance in the back­drop of a mus­cu­lar po­lit­i­cal cul­ture pa­tron­ized and pro­moted by the BJP.

BJP’s po­lit­i­cal style is founded on mas­cu­line chest-thump­ing. The claim of hav­ing a 56 inches chest by Naren­dra Modi, ac­quires so­cio-po­lit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance in the back­drop of a mus­cu­lar po­lit­i­cal cul­ture pa­tron­ized and pro­moted by the BJP.

BJP’s cam­paign in­volv­ing a lot of chest-thump­ing and masochis­tic vit­riol is, there­fore, par for the course of their pol­i­tics. How­ever, if we look be­yond this mist of pro­pa­ganda and bravado we might wit­ness a deeply wor­ried BJP spec­u­lat­ing the po­lit­i­cal costs of a be­low-par per­for­mance in the as­sem­bly elec­tions in As­sam and West Ben­gal. Here we will con­fine our ob­ser­va­tions to Ben­gal.

In­for­ma­tion from the ground in Ben­gal does not paint a very rosy pic­ture for BJP’s poll prospects. In­for­ma­tion gleaned from the re­portage on Ben­gal polls pre­sents a pic­ture op­po­site to the drum­beat­ing by the BJP lead­er­ship.

In phases, one and two, BJP has an up­per hand but not by much. BJP has un­der­per­formed in Jun­gle Ma­hal. This ex­plains why the in­flu­en­tial tribal leader Chakrad­har Mahto, who upon his re­lease on bail on charges of com­man­deer­ing a train joined TMC, was re­ar­rested by the NIA.

TMC has main­tained its past per­for­mance in phases three and four. It’s to be noted that Cooch Be­har, which went to the polls in phase four, wit­nessed vi­o­lent clashes be­tween the old and the new BJP in the run-up to the polls.

BJP may live to re­gret the death of five youth in Cooch Be­har.

BJP may live to re­gret the death of five youth in Cooch Be­har. This fir­ing will re­sult in the con­sol­i­da­tion of the mi­nor­ity votes thereby un­der­min­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of AIMIM and ISF wean­ing votes away from Tri­namool Con­gress. Since fir­ing was re­sorted to in the first half of 10 April, be­tween 10.00 am to 10.30 am, it must have im­pacted vot­ing trends even on 10 April too.  It is bound to have a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact in Mur­shid­abad, Hal­dia and Malda dis­tricts, that go to polls in the sixth to eighth phase.

The fir­ing that will re­mind the bad old days of po­lice ex­cesses be­gin­ning from the 1970s to Nandi­gram and Sin­gur may turn a sec­tion of 45-plus vot­ers away from the BJP. Such events of ex­cesses have left an in­deli­ble scar on the psy­che of the Ben­gali mid­dle class which has been mythol­o­gized in cul­tural pro­duc­tions such as Hazar Chaurasi ki Maa.

Even­tu­ally, there­fore, the BJP’s elec­toral per­for­mance will fall far short of the highs it reached in 2019 par­lia­men­tary polls. It’s nec­es­sary to un­der­score here that in the Lok Sabha elec­tions, BJP in­creased its poll per­cent­age by eat­ing into the Left-Con­gress votes. This may not be re­peated in the on­go­ing as­sem­bly elec­tions as the Left and Con­gress have man­aged a pretty im­pres­sive cam­paign and are poised to win back a sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of its vot­ers that had been lost to the BJP.

The biggest im­ped­i­ment to the BJP’s poll prospects is its or­ga­ni­za­tional weak­ness. Lack­ing an or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­ture in rural Ben­gal, the BJP went over­board in en­gi­neer­ing de­fec­tions from TMC.

Ev­i­dently, their suc­cess in this en­deav­our fell far short of the hype cre­ated by Amit Shah, who had claimed re­peat­edly from var­i­ous pub­lic fora that Didi -(read sis­ter, as Mamta Baner­jee is pop­u­larly known to her party folks and the gen­eral pub­lic in West Ben­gal) will be left alone when polls com­mence. Notwith­stand­ing, a clutch of high-value de­fec­tions, the TMC or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­ture was left un­scathed.

BJP, which is oth­er­wise syn­ony­mous with a rigidly dis­ci­plined po­lit­i­cal party with a well-de­fined struc­ture of com­mand, is fac­ing a for­mi­da­ble elec­toral ma­chine of TMC, with an or­ga­ni­za­tion that does­n’t have strong lo­cal lead­er­ship and is riven with fac­tions.

The im­pact of these de­fec­tions, how­ever, were no­to­ri­ously desta­bi­liz­ing for the BJP. There were open re­bel­lions in the BJP against the re­cent im­ports. The fes­ter­ing wound of fac­tional fights erupted in full pub­lic view in Cooch Be­har. Less dra­matic but equally sig­nif­i­cant were the silent de­fi­ance and non-co­op­er­a­tion of the BJP rank and file which com­pelled the cen­tral lead­er­ship to change their cho­sen can­di­date on more than one oc­ca­sions. Ev­i­dently, the BJP cen­tral lead­er­ship was so hob­bled, by these fac­tional fights, that it had to field 4 MP’s in the as­sem­bly polls. It was also com­pelled to stag­ger the de­c­la­ra­tion of the list of can­di­dates thereby los­ing pre­cious time for the cam­paign.

The value of a well oiled or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­ture can­not be un­der­es­ti­mated in an elec­tion. Even if anti-in­cum­bency ex­ists against a state gov­ern­ment, as is the case in Ben­gal, an ex­ten­sive or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­ture is re­quired to con­vert pub­lic dis­en­chant­ment into votes. Con­versely, an or­ga­ni­za­tion that is a di­vided house fails at the hus­tings.

The case in point be­ing Tripura were a di­vided BJP, which had to face 11 rebel can­di­dates in a 30 mem­ber (of which 28 went to polls) Tripura Tribal Ar­eas Au­tonomous Dis­trict Coun­cil (TTAADC), lost to The TIPRA Motha, led by royal scion Pradyot Kishore Manikya Deb­barma. To add in­sult to the in­jury of a hu­mil­i­at­ing de­feat, it may be noted that TIPRA was formed just two months be­fore the ADC elec­tion.

BJP, which is oth­er­wise syn­ony­mous with a rigidly dis­ci­plined po­lit­i­cal party with a well-de­fined struc­ture of com­mand, is fac­ing a for­mi­da­ble elec­toral ma­chine of TMC, with an or­ga­ni­za­tion that does­n’t have strong lo­cal lead­er­ship and is riven with fac­tions.

It would­n’t be un­rea­son­able to spec­u­late that BJP in Ben­gal as­sem­bly elec­tions may suf­fer the same fate as in Tripura.