The most awaited election of 2021 in West Bengal is finally over, with quite unexpected results. Most surveys indicated that among TMC and BJP, one will get 150-170 seats and the other, 100-120, while the Left-Congress may win 20-40 seats. Finally TMC swept the election by a margin no one had come anywhere close to predicting, except their own strategist Prashant Kishore, who was ridiculed by almost everyone for his super-confident assertion. The biggest losers in the election are clearly the Left and Congress, who fought in an alliance along with a new party called ISF. For the first time, both of these two former heavyweights of state politics have 0 MLAs. But given the extraordinary circumstances of this election, this should hardly be surprising.
First of all, most elections in West Bengal have always been bipolar, with a third side rarely putting up a competitive performance. West Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha seats, and each of them consists of 7 assembly seats, thus we have 294 assembly seats. In this analysis, we will consider all elections in terms of assembly seats only. In 1998, 2001, 2009, 2011 and 2016 the winning side won/led in around 190-220 assembly seats, while the runners-up side won 60-80. In 2006 and 2014 there was one hugely dominant side with 220+ seats, while the remaining 70-odd got split between multiple smaller formations. Slightly different were 1999 and 2019, where the winning party was less dominant by winning 160-180 assembly seats, but even then the elections were largely bipolar with third force Congress leading in 20 and 9 seats respectively.
Ever since losing power in 2011, the Left has tended to align with Congress. They had a "seat-sharing deal" in 2016, a partial understanding in 2019, and a full alliance in 2021. If we consider the elections in 2014 and 2016, most of the seats won by these parties were concentrated in the "Middle Bengal" districts of North and South Dinajpur, Malda and Murshidabad, along with some smatterings elsewhere. Incidentally, these are the places with the highest concentrations of minorities in West Bengal. Cut to 2019, and the picture changes completely. Left and Congress fought separately in 2019, but for clarity let us consider them together by adding up their votes (though perfect vote transfer doesn't happen in alliances). In 2019 we saw massive reductions of their vote share everywhere, and in many places like Northern (Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Alipurduar etc) and Western Bengal (Purulia, Bankura, Medinipur etc) their combined vote share was below 10%. This loss was mostly of the Left, as Congress were anyway weak in these places, except Purulia. Only in the Congress bastions of Murshidabad and to a lesser extent Malda we saw the alliance retain winnability, where they won 2 parliamentary seats and led in 16 assembly segments. The only places where the Left was somewhat in the game were in the Jadavpur region of Kolkata, including Behala, Tollygunge, Sonarpur and Baruipur, and to a lesser extent in the Dum Dum region to the North of Kolkata. Incidentally, these are the areas with high concentration of the 1947-era refugees from erstwhile East Bengal, a demographic which provided huge support to the Left since the 1950s.
On seeing the 2019 results, a major question arose - where did the former voters of Left and Congress go? Empirical and anecdotal evidence makes it clear - muslim voters went to TMC and hindu voters to BJP. The latter has been famously described as the "baam theke Ram" or "left to right" phenomena by many journalists. The reasons for such a shift seems to be twofold: political and social. Firstly, many former leaders and cadres of the Left have been at the receiving end of harassment from the TMC cadre and state police ever since 2011. Understanding that BJP is in a much better position to offer them protection from such violence than their own party, they defected in large numbers. This is especially true in places like Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and Medinipur where politics is quite violent. On the other hand, the former Left supporters from the marginalized castes (mostly SC and ST) were attracted by i) BJP's money power, ii) religious/communal mobilization by RSS, iii) BJP's promise of resolving citizenship concerns of Matuas in the Bongaon-Ranaghat region and Rajbangshis in North Bengal. These castes had always existed on the fringes of Bengali society, and their presence was hardly ever acknowledged by the Bhadralok-dominated Bengali society under Left. The BJP and RSS had given them the scope of self assertion (through Ram Navami rallies etc) and dreams of material success. In 2019, this shift from Left to Right greatly harmed TMC, especially in the western and Northern parts of the state where TMCs roots are not deep enough. It may be noted that these places had remained with the Left even in 2009, even as Buddhadev's government became very unpopular. A statistical analysis shows that TMC did much better in those assembly segments where Left-Congress retained some amount of votes, say about 20000 (roughly 10%). But in the places where they collapsed below 10000, BJP often fell heavy on TMC.
On the other hand, the Muslims who supported Congress and Left may have had problems with TMC, but they did not want to vote BJP for obvious reasons. They hung on with Congress wherever it was strong enough (Malda and Murshidabad), and elsewhere they unwillingly voted for TMC.
It is against this backdrop that Left and Congress approached the election of 2021. Their defeat was so deep in 2019, that it would take a miracle for them to win and form a government. No sane person should have considered this as possible, especially given that BJP was throwing in the kitchen sink for winning the election, and TMC was also fighting a determined war. In such a situation, the aim of Left/Congress should have been fairly straightforward: Bring back as much as possible their former voters who have drifted towards BJP - this would simultaneously solve their selfish need of surviving as parties, as well as the ideological need of weakening BJP. However, this was difficult - as the practical and emotional reasons for voting for BJP were strong enough. It would have required a sustained ideological campaign in the hinterlands - reaching out to those people and convincing them about the need to defeat BJP. It would have taken time, but they had time: 2years.
Unfortunately, CPM did not do that.
Instead, this task was done by young boys and girls from various progressive/left-leaning organizations, but they lacked the framework which a party like CPM could have provided. Another thing which Left/Congress could have done is to focus on only a small number of seats (40-50) and concentrate much of their strength there - not only for election but also for social activities. While Congress did this to an extent - their leader Adhir Chowdhury put in tremendous efforts in Murshidabad, Malda and North Dinajpur, no such strategic focus was seen from the Left.
So, what all did Left do during this period? In my opinion, they did two good things: maintain a mechanism of social service during the lockdown and Amphan (Shramjeevi canteen etc), and brought forward a number of young candidates to contest the elections. Unfortunately, both have limitations. The scale of their social service was not large enough to translate into votes in such a short time, and similarly the young candidates did not get enough time to establish bases in their respective constituencies, which would have taken at least 1 year of sustained efforts on the ground. The results for the young candidates were partially encouraging. Their innovative campaigns through music and dance, as well as their honesty and sharpness impressed many people. In some cases they translated into votes also. In Bally, Dipsita Dhar increased the alliance's votes from 16000 in 2019 to 22000 in 2021. In Diamond Harbour, Pratik-ur-Rahaman doubled the alliance's votes from 19000 in 2019 to 38000 in 2021. Srijan Sengupta in Singur pulled them up from 19000 in 2019 to 30000 in 2021. Other former MLAs who are popular in their areas, such as Sujan Chakraborty in Jadavpur, Kanti Ganguly in Raidighi, Tanmoy Bhattacharya in Dum Dum Uttar, Ashok Bhattacharya in Siliguri, Nepal Mahata (from Congress) in Baghmundi etc got decent number of votes, but not enough to win. However, the limitations of this approach got exposed in many cases - most notably in Nandigram. Amid a bullfight between heavyweights, CPM's youth leader Minakshi Mukherjee earned praise from localites for her energetic campaign focussing on jobs, social security etc, in stark contrast to the bluster by the heavyweights. Yet, she got only about 6000 votes, even below the 10000-odd votes in 2019. This illustrates how most people in the state saw the election as a binary: for some it was yes-Mamata or no-Mamata, for others it was yes-BJP or no-BJP. Many people felt that voting for the alliance would be a waste in the larger scheme of things, and even if they got a good MLA from the alliance, this won't help the region as (s)he will most likely be in the opposition. This binarized thinking is consistent with the previous elections in Bengal, most of which were bipolar as discussed above.
Did Left-Congress not understand all these problems? Congress may have understood it, and quietly prioritized defeating BJP while fighting alongside the Left. Their central leadership largely stayed away from the campaign, and when Rahul Gandhi did show up in West Bengal for campaign, he attacked only BJP without mentioning TMC. Even though Adhir Chowdhury did put in a tremendous amount of effort in campaigning, it is not impossible that he strategically laid low just before the elections in the strongholds of Malda, Murshidabad and Dinajpur, thereby allowing his supporters, including many Muslims, to silently transfer their votes to TMC in order to stop BJP. But Left mostly remained confused about strategy and aims, and finally ended up tying themselves into knots. Many of their leaders seemed to believe that they too are potential winners of the elections. They refused to concede that BJP was a bigger enemy than TMC. They even refused to acknowledge the key problem - that their former supporters had voted for BJP in 2019 and may repeat in 2021. Instead, they went along pressing the "Bijemool" theory - that BJP and TMC are essentially the same and one cannot be defeated without defeating the other. This may have actually been an astute campaign slogan - telling the former Left supporters that voting BJP to stop TMC won't help as the same people who tortured them as TMC leaders would return as BJP leaders. This may have been a short-cut way of winning back their former voters, without any sustained ideological campaign on the ground. However, it seems that many Left leaders, especially the younger social media-savvy ones, themselves believed the same propaganda! This disconnected them from the ground realities, and in effect they ended up campaigning in front of the mirror. They even ridiculed senior communist leaders from hardcore groups like CPI(ML)(Liberation) who advised them to distinguish between enemy and competitor. A few senior CPM leaders like Manik Sarkar from Tripura did go around asking people not to bring in a shark (BJP) to drive out a crocodile (TMC). However, it was probably too little, too late. Most of the former Left voters who had voted for BJP in 2019 did the same this time. Those who did realize the danger from BJP, ended up voting for TMC as the most potent anti-BJP force.
While Left and Congress drew a blank each, their new alliance partner ISF managed to win 1 seat - Bhangor. Their presence in the alliance had raised many eyebrows among their well-wishers - from staunch secularists to closet Islamophobes - who contended that the presence of ISF in the alliance would mean that no one (read Hindu) would vote for them. This does not seem to be true. People had many reasons for not voting the Left alliance, but ISF's presence was surely not one of them. ISF actually fielded 50% hindu candidates, and some of them did quite well. ISF remained far away from the news headlines as the election dragged on and on. However, their victory in Bhangor is a point to be noted. This was a seat where there had been a long agitation against land acquisition by TMC government, and this agitation was led by far-left CPI(ML)(Red Star). Like the CPI(ML)(Liberation) which recently won a stunning 12 seats in Bihar, Red Star too is an uncompromising communist party. Had they been invited into this alliance, they could have fought and won Bhangor, and we would have had a dedicated, uncompromising communist leader in the Assembly. Instead, we will have a semi-religious leader from ISF.
Overall, it can be said that the Left's obsession with their 2011 defeat to TMC resulted in stubbornness and refusal to see the extraordinary context of this election, which led to their downfall. For Bengal's future, it is imperative that they rise very soon. They have to continue to invest in their young promising leaders, but they urgently need to turn away from memories of past and focus on the current context with ideological clarity. Some of their saner leaders have already called for the same.
