Kolkata: At a tea stall in Bhagobangola, one of West Bengal’s assembly segments with the densest Muslim concentration (87%), customers were discussing the elections – from what is happening in the country to the happenings in the state and their constituency, Murshidabad Lok Sabha. But it was the campaign of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] candidate, Md. Salim, that seemed to have interested them the most.
“Salim has a good chance,” said Safiqul Islam, “His campaign got a good response.” Sk Jabbar seconded him, saying that some people were getting tired of unchecked corruption by the leaders of the state’s ruling party, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), and it reflected in the enthusiasm for Salim’s rallies.
In Murshidabad Lok Sabha, CPI(M) state secretary Md Salim is the Congress-backed candidate and hopes to wrest the seat from the TMC. Photo Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
The Congress, which has tied up with the Left in West Bengal, had activated its entire machinery to ensure Salim’s victory, added Jamir Mollah.
One of them identified as a supporter of the TMC, while others said they were undecided. The gist of their discussions was that the panchayat election result had shown the decline in the TMC’s popularity and Salim’s candidature galvanised the support base of the Left and the Congress.
The Murshidabad Lok Sabha seat has the highest Muslim concentration in the state – 67%; issues like governance, corruption, employment and infrastructure have dominated the discussions here.
Of the three Lok Sabha seats in Murshidabad district, the TMC appears ahead of its opponents in Jangipur Lok Sabha, which the party wrested from the Congress in 2019. However, Murshidabad and Baharampur, where heavyweights are in the fray, Muslim votes seem to have sharply split.
The big fights
The two neighbouring constituencies of Murshidabad and Baharampur have also drawn the attention of the whole state as two of Mamata Banerjee’s harshest critics – CPI(M) state secretary Md Salim and Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury – are in the fray here. They are known to share a good rapport and are often referred to as the “Adhir-Salim juti (pair)”.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In the 2021 assembly election, the TMC swept Murshidabad district, winning 20 of the 22 seats. The rest went to the BJP. But locals point out that the situation has changed. In the panchayat election, Murshidabad emerged as the heartland of the Left and the Congress’s revival from their 2021 nadir.
Of the CPI(M)’s 3,187 gram panchayat seats in the state, 563 came from Murshidabad and 1,142 of the Congress’s 2,680 seats came from this district. Going by panchayat election vote share, the TMC’s stood at about 48% and the Left-Congress combined votes at around 40% in Murshidabad Lok Sabha. In Baharampur Lok Sabha, the TMC polled about 47%, while the combined votes of the Left and the Congress stood at around 37%.
Political observers point out that in West Bengal, the local poll vote share of the ruling party almost always goes down in bigger elections like assembly and Lok Sabha. They attribute it to the various advantages that the ruling party gets in using the administration during the local elections.
“There is anti-incumbency against the TMC and Salim is a heavyweight candidate who has received the wholehearted backing of the Bengal Congress president. Besides, the TMC incumbent Abu Taher Khan has been largely inactive due to prolonged illnesses,” said Tarik Anwar, a tailor at Azimganj, while explaining why he expects Muslim votes to have split sharply.
“Of course, TMC remains popular among a large section of Muslims,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
As expected, Baharampur witnessed a nail-biter. Here, Hindus and Muslims both constitute half the population. Chowdhury won the seat with a margin of 80,696 votes in 2019. In 2021, of the seven assembly segments, the TMC won six and the BJP won one. Chowdhury’s hometown went to the BJP.
Now, both the TMC and the BJP have fielded formidable candidates – the TMC’s Yusuf Pathan is a cricket star, and the BJP’s Nirmal Saha is a popular local doctor.
Chowdhury’s 2019 victory was made possible by the massive lead of 89,061 votes he got from the Hindu-dominated Baharampur assembly segment. In 2021, Chowdhury’s hometown saw a saffron surge, with the BJP winning the Baharampur assembly seat by a margin of 26,852 votes, securing 45% of polled votes, trouncing Congress veteran Manoj Chakraborty, one of Chowdhury’s closest aides.
But the municipal election hinted at the BJP’s loss of ground in the town, as the party became a distant third in a TMC versus Congress contest.
Billboard in support of Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury in Baharampur Lok Sabha which he has won five times. Photo Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
“When Dada is the candidate, many equations change,” said Manirul Islam Sarkar, referring to the Bengal Congress president, popularly referred to as Dada in Baharampur. “If Pathan is a star, so is Dada in his own capacity.” Chowdhury is also the leader of the Congress in the outgoing Lok Sabha, a post that came in recognition of his five consecutive victories.
But the Lok Sabha candidates against him do not leave him in a comfortable position. On the one hand, Pathan’s election rallies have drawn massive crowds in Muslim-dominated areas and chief minister Banerjee’s welfare schemes have created a strong beneficiary base among women from both communities. The TMC campaign blames Chowdhury for the breakdown of Congress-TMC seat-sharing talks and dubs the Bengal Congress president as the BJP’s agent.
The TMC’s Baharampur candidate, ex-cricketer Yusuf Pathan, hopes to wrest this Congress bastion where Muslims form half the population. Photo Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
On the other hand, Saha’s candidature had motivated the BJP workers to go for a kill. In Baharampur, Muslims form marginally above 50% of the population. If Muslim votes have split, strong Hindu polarisation could have given them a chance of wresting the Congress bastion. It is one of the few Lok Sabha constituencies in West Bengal where Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, a Hindutva poster boy, came to address a public rally.
According to Nurul Rahman, a trader at Nabagram, one of the seven assembly segments in Baharampur, two factors weigh in favour of Chowdhury. First, the Congress still holds the seat, which seems to have made it the primary choice among a large section of voters. Second, the Congress and the Left have performed fairly well in the panchayat elections.
“Though the TMC’s campaign branding Chowdhury as BJP’s B-team has resonated with a section of voters, I doubt if the majority of Muslims would dump Chowdhury for an outsider,” he said. Pathan is from Gujarat.
Baharampur voted on May 13 while Murshidabad went to polls on May 7.
The South Bengal equations
In the 2023 panchayat election, the CPI(M)’s best performance in the state was in Murshidabad and the second-best in Nadia, the northern part of Nadia that composes Kriahnangar Lok Sabha in particular. The Congress, too, recorded a presence.
A similar split in Muslim votes in the Krishnanagar constituency likely made the contest closer. About 35% of its voters are Muslims. Krishnanagar also went to polls on May 13.
In the Lok Sabha election as well as the 2021 assembly election, the contest polarised between the TMC and the BJP here. But in the panchayat election, the Left-Congress combined vote overtook that of the BJP, which has boosted the campaign of the Congress-backed CPI(M) candidate, former legislator S.M. Sadi.
The BJP has fielded a political greenhorn, Amrita Roy, a member of Krishnanagar’s erstwhile royal family. Prime Minister Modi and home minister Amit Shah have both campaigned for Roy.
This constituency’s claim to recent fame is its TMC candidate, Mahua Moitra, who won the seat in 2019, emerged as one of the harshest critics of Modi in the Parliament, and was expelled from the Lok Sabha last year following a controversial proceeding by the ethics committee of the Parliament.
The 49-year-old has been accused of accepting bribes for asking questions in the Parliament. Moitra accepted that she had shared her parliamentary log-in credentials with a businessman and did receive some “small gifts” from her businessman “friend” but refused any involvement of cash or monetary benefits. She has received the full backing of the party chief, who said the BJP wanted to silence Moitra because she troubled them.
However, the prospect of Left revival has kept the TMC leadership anxious, as the Left panchayat election performance in Krishnanagar was better in Muslim-concentration areas than Hindu-dominated ones.
“This year, the intensity of the TMC-BJP polarisation appears weaker. A lot depends on where the Left-Congress candidate gets more votes, in Hindu-dominated areas or the Muslim-concentration segments,” said a teacher at Krishnanagar College who did not want to be identified. “On the surface, Hindu polarisation appeared stronger than Muslim polarisation,” he added.
TMC all-India general secretary and the party chief’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee’s Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha, which he has been winning since 2014, has Muslims forming about 38% of the population.
Diamond Harbour is a TMC bastion. Abhishek Banerjee won in 2019 with a margin of 3.2 lakh votes and the party’s lead in the assembly election 2021 in the seven segments was 3.6 lakh. Here, neither the Left nor the Congress made any impression in the local elections.
Over the past three years, the Indian Secular Front (ISF) had started showing some signs of popularity among a section of Muslims and ISF chief Naushad Siddiqi had created a great deal of suspense by threatening to contest from Diamond Harbour. However, he finally did not join the poll fray, which has taken a lot of steam out of the anti-TMC campaign among Muslims in Diamond Harbour.
The CPI(M) has fielded one of the party’s “young Turks”, Pratikur Rahman, the state unit president of the party’s student wing, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI). While his campaign has a visible presence of Muslims, local residents do not expect any major shift in the TMC’s Muslim support base.
One of the most-talked-about constituencies in the state is Basirhat, of which the trouble-torn Sandeshkhali is a part. Muslims constitute about 45% of the population in Basirhat Lok Sabha and the TMC won the seat with a massive margin of 3.5 lakh votes in 2019. The party maintained its dominance even in the 2021 assembly election, winning all seven constituencies. In the local elections, the TMC polled over 70% of the votes. The combined votes of the Left and the Congress stood close to 20%.
However, the BJP’s high-voltage campaign over Sandeshkhali, accusing the local TMC leadership of systematic sexual harassment of women, changed many equations. Subsequently, a series of sting videos and statements from local women accusing the BJP of misleading them in lodging sexual harassment charges have added another twist.
Salim Mollah, a voter in Basirhat Dakshin assembly segment of Basirhat Lok Sabha, narrates why he thinks the TMC’s vote share will dip but the party will retain the seat. Photo Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Salim Mollah, a shopkeeper at the Basirhat Dakshin assembly segment, said that the Sandeshkhali episode may have two different kinds of impacts.
It initially triggered anti-incumbency and the BJP quickly started polarising Hindus. Then, the sting videos and video interviews of local women have created doubts in people’s minds over the authenticity of the charges. However, many people have also resonated with the corruption and misgovernance charges that the Sandeshkhali protests highlighted.
“Even if the BJP planted the charge of sexual harassment, as the sting videos and local women allege, none is doubting the misrule that the TMC had imposed on Sandesahkhali. I won’t be surprised if the TMC loses some votes to the ISF and the Left-Congress alliance,” said Athar Mollah, a grocer at Minakhan.
He added that what remains to be seen is if the Left can take advantage of the BJP’s embarrassments due to the sting videos and prevent the Hindu polarisation.
The CPI(M)’s Nirapada Haldar, a former Sandeshkhali MLA whom the police had jailed during the Sandeshkhali agitation, is the Congress-backed Left candidate. The BJP has fielded Rekha Patra, who herself claims to be a victim of sexual harassment. However, the sting video and subsequent interviews by complainants have also dragged her name into what the TMC described as a “conspiracy to defame Bengal and insult Bengal’s mothers and sisters.”
To retain Basirhat, of which the trouble-torn Sandeshkhaki is a part, the TMC has nominated former MP and current MLA Haji Nurul Islam. Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Rafikul Mandal, a farmer at Minakhan, said he was confident that Muslims would remain polarised in favour of the TMC due to the BJP’s communal campaign over Sandeshkhali.
“The BJP’s main campaign is that Muslims are torturing Hindu women. Just imagine how insulting it is. I had decided to vote against the TMC this time but the BJP’s campaign makes it necessary that we prioritise the BJP’s defeat,” Mandal said.
This is the second of a two-part series on Muslim voting in West Bengal. Read the first part here.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is an independent journalist.
