Dear Express reader, A new round of state elections kicked off this week with robust turnouts in phase 1 polling in West Bengal and Assam. Elections will also take place in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry. There will be specific contours and curiosities of each electoral arena and the players will arrange their pitch accordingly. For instance, BJP, even as it promises implementation of the amended Citizenship Act in West Bengal, goes strategically silent on it in Assam. Congress, fighting the Left in Kerala, allies with it in West Bengal. The Left will need to decide who it regards as the greater enemy, TMC or BJP, in a state it ruled for over three decades and where it is neither the main protagonist nor the main opponent today. And in Tamil Nadu, the election campaign and result will help decide who will step into the oversized cutouts vacated by the deaths of M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa, as the former’s son takes on the latter’s loyalist. One thing is clear, make that two. The West Bengal election is a seminal one. And the performance of the non-BJP parties in this round of polls will indicate whether, in the foreseeable future, there will be a counter and check on BJP’s will to conquer all spaces, inside and outside the electoral arena, or not. While they are being fought, in times of shortened visions and compressed time-frames, all elections pose as make-or-break. Especially in times of BJP dominance, no election looks less important or too small. And yet, Bengal seems more consequential than most. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta pointed out in a column on our pages earlier this month, Bengal’s “spectacular self-images”, revolutionary and progressive, that the whole nation has bought into, have relegated its realities, “hidden in plain sight”, of caste and communalism, corruption and coercion. Not any more. “In this election”, Mehta wrote, “these four Cs have come into the open, all at once.” In this altered mindscape, in a state which bore the brunt of Partition, BJP is fighting “on a terrain where it is strong: The tapping of repressed memories”. It is trying to become the new face of poriborton. Mamata Banerjee, the original mascot of the politics of poriborton in Bengal, and arguably the most prominent leader in the Opposition ranks nationally — if you don't count Rahul Gandhi, and it is still not clear if you should — now carries a baggage of a 10-year incumbency. She must overcome that, while fighting off BJP’s aggressive challenge which is shored up by its position as the ruling party at the Centre. A dramatic rise in BJP’s graph has catapulted it to its pole position in Bengal: It won 3 assembly seats for the first time in the 2016 assembly polls, and then 18 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats in the parliamentary polls in 2019. A good performance by the BJP in Bengal, therefore, will carry a powerful symbolic resonance. It will also have real consequences. Perhaps the biggest one will be this: The party which uses electoral mandates to occupy and dominate non-electoral spaces will get a potent weapon. If it happens, the conquest of Bengal will come in handy to extend the BJP’s narrative dominance and embolden its right-of-way at a variety of sites, political and non-political— in the media and in the university, in the court and in the bureaucracy, vis a vis the protesting farmers of Punjab and minorities who feel excluded by laws such as the CAA. “Khela hobe”, says the TMC slogan. That’s right, the game is on. Till next week, Vandita | 
No comments:
Post a Comment