Will Bengal’s Muslims Vote Differently This Time?

Kolkata: Abdur Razzak, a middle-aged vegetable trader at Kushidah, known for its weekly Tuesday market, decided on his political choice well before the campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections started.

“I voted for Didi in 2021 (assembly election) and in the panchayat election (in 2023). But this is Rahul Gandhi’s vote,” said Razzak, a voter from the Harishchandrapur assembly segment in northern West Bengal’s Malda district.

A few kms away, S.K. Nasib, a farmer at Mobarakpur village within Mokdumpur gram panchayat area of the Chanchal assembly segment, echoed him. “Here, equations change from election to election. In the Assembly election, I voted for Didi. In panchayat, I voted for the CPI(M). This is the jot’s turn now.” By ‘jot’, he refers to the Left-Congress alliance.

Harishchandrapur and Chanchal, part of Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, saw close contests between the Left and the Congress for many years until the Trinamool Congress (TMC) breached that impenetrable fortress of Malda, one of Bengal’s three Muslim-majority districts, in 2021.

In Harishchandrapur, Congress’ Mostaque Alam defeated the Left in 2001, Left’s Tajmul Hossain defeated Alam in 2006, Hossain fought on a TMC ticket and defeated Alam in 2011, Alam recovered the seat in 2016 and Hossain won it back in 2021.

The 2021 election saw unprecedented polarisation of Muslim votes in favour of the TMC, as Alam’s vote share reached a record low of only 14%. He came third and lost his deposit, as the BJP came second with a 22% vote share. The TMC had pulled 60% of polled votes.

Alam is now the Left-backed Congress candidate for Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, on a mission to recover the seat from the BJP. He faces the BJP’s incumbent, Khagen Murmu, and TMC’s police officer-turned-politician Prasun Bandyopadhyay. Muslims constitute about 45% of Malda Uttar’s electorate.

Of the seven assembly segments that form the Lok Sabha seat, the TMC holds four and the BJP holds the rest. But the panchayat election trends make Alam confident. In Harishchandrapur, during the zilla parishad election, the Left-Congress combined votes (they contested separately in the rural polls) of 73,302 was above the TMC’s 68,210. The BJP stood at a mere 11,679 votes.

In Malda Uttar Lok Sabha, going by the panchayat election result in the Zilla parishad seats and the civic polls in Old Maldah municipality, the TMC’s local election votes stood at 4,59,536, (roughly 44%), the Left-Congress combined vote at 3,20,402 (roughly 31%), and the BJP at 233,121 votes (roughly 22%).

Political observers pointed 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.

The TMC has pitched itself as the real anti-BJP force and branded the Bengal Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) as the BJP’s secret friends. But many are not buying it.

“See how Prime Minister Narendra Modi is targeting the Congress saying it will distribute wealth among Muslims. This is because the Congress is his real challenger,” said Hasanul Sarkar, an e-rickshaw driver at Ratua, part of Malda Uttar.

However, Razzak, Nasib and Sarkar all said that they have not been able to convince the women in their homes to vote for the Congress. “They are for Didi. She is giving them pocket money,” quipped Sarkar, referring to the Mamata Banerjee government’s Lakshmir Bhandar scheme of monthly assistance to women from the weaker section of the society.

Sariful Mandal, an elderly farmer at Ratua, fiercely defended the TMC. “After what Banerjee has done for the poor, we cannot betray her. She is the most reliable politician,” he said. He, however, sounded apprehensive that anti-incumbency against the TMC due to corruption charges may result in a decreased vote share.

Muslims make up 27% of West Bengal’s population, according to the 2011 census. They live mostly in the north Bengal districts of Uttar Dinajpur (49.9% share of population) and Malda (51.3%), the central Bengal district of Murshidabad (66.3%) and the south Bengal districts of Birbhum (37%), South 24-Parganas (35.6%), Nadia (26.8%) and North 24-Parganas (25.8%).

Of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, Muslims play a major role in determining the fate of Raiganj, Malda Uttar, Malda Dakshin, Murshidabad, Jangipur, Baharampur, Krishnanagar, Birbhum, Basirhat, Jaynagar and Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha as well as the Balurghat, Uluberia and Bolpur Lok Sabha seats.

In 2019, Muslim votes sharply split between the TMC, the BJP, the Left, and the Congress in four corner contests in the Raiganj seat of Uttar Dinajpur and Malda Uttar. This resulted in the BJP’s victory in Raiganj with a 40% vote share and a 37.6% vote share in Maldah Uttar.

The BJP’s Sreerupa Mitra Chowdhury almost won the Malda Dakshin Lok Sabha, falling short of the Congress incumbent, Abu Hashem Khan Chowdhury, by about 8,000 votes, a meagre 0.7 percentage point less than the Congress’ 34.7% vote share.

However, the equations in all these constituencies changed in the 2021 assembly elections and the 2022-23 elections in the panchayats and municipalities.

Changing equations

The 2021 assembly election saw the TMC sweeping the three Muslim-majority districts – bagging 20 of 22 seats in Murshidabad with a 54% vote share; eight of the 12 seats in Malda with a 53% vote share, and seven of nine seats in Uttar Dinajpur, with a 53.3% vote share. The rest of the seats went to the BJP.

In south Bengal, too, they swept the Muslim-dominated areas, except Bhangar assembly in South 24-Parganas district, where the Left-Congress ally Indian Secular Front (ISF) candidate Naushad Siddiqui won.

But the panchayat elections showed a shift from the political bipolarity of the assembly elections, at least in some pockets.

Ratua resident Saddam Mollah says that the BJP’s 2019 victory in Malda Uttar was largely because it managed to draw the majority of the traditional Left Hindu votes by poaching three-time CPI(M) MLA Murmu. In the panchayat election, a large portion of this vote went back to the Left.

As Muslim votes look likely to sharply split, the fate of the constituency depends on if the BJP manages to bring back the votes that went back to the Left in the panchayat elections, Mollah says.

In Malda Dakshin Lok Sabha, the TMC holds six of the seven assembly segments and the BJP holds one. Here, the BJP has renominated Chowdhury, currently the party’s Englishbazar MLA, while the Congress has fielded the incumbent’s son, Isha Khan Chowdhury, a former MLA. Isha’s biggest asset is his late uncle, ABA Ghani Khan Chowdhury, a legendary Congress leader whose name still works in elections in Malda.

The TMC nominee is Shahjahan Ali Raihan, who once served as the national secretary of the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO), the student wing of the Jamiaat Ulema e Hind, worked as a journalist at a Bengali daily and later enrolled as a doctoral researcher in modern history at the University of Oxford.

In Malda Dakshin, where nearly 59% of the electorate are Muslims, the BJP managed to secure a 34% vote share by sheer polarisation of Hindu votes in 2019. But the panchayat election data shows that the combined vote of the Congress and the Left stood at 41%, marginally behind the TMC’s 42%. The BJP’s vote share was only 15%.

“This vote will neither be like the assembly elections nor the panchayat polls. Even the Lok Sabha election 2019 pattern may not repeat. We may see new equations. Many things have changed and many people are silent about what they are thinking,” said Azhar Ali Mollah, a vegetable vendor at Manikchak, which falls within the Malda Dakshin constituency.

Among these changes, Mollah said, is a weaker pro-Hindutva wave, higher resentment against the TMC over corruption and local governance and the coming together of the Left and the Congress.

Sujapur, one of the assembly segments of Malda Dakshin, presents a perfect example of the changing voting pattern. It has the densest Muslim population in the state. The segment is composed of Kaliachak I community development block, where 89.3% of the population are Muslims.

Isha won the Sujapur seat in 2016 with a margin of 47,000 votes and his father Abu Hashem took a lead of about 30,000 votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections but the TMC won it in 2021 with an incredible margin of 1.3 lakh votes. In a pro-TMC storm, Khan Chowdhury Jr.’s vote share came down to 10.7%.

But the trend started reversing, as the panchayat election saw neck and neck fight between the Congress and the TMC – going by the results of the three zilla parishad seats – the Left-Congress combined votes stood at 114,281 and the TMC’s at 110,562.

A similar split is expected in Raiganj Lok Sabha, where Muslims make up about 46% of the electorate. Of the seven assembly segments, the TMC holds five and the BJP had two until Raiganj BJP MLA Krishna Kalyani switched to the TMC. Kalyani is now the TMC’s Raiganj candidate, while the BJP has shifted the incumbent, Debasree Chaudhuri, to Kolkata Dakshin constituency.

In Raiganj, the votes of the Left and the Congress combined and that of BJP stood at about 25% each, marginally higher on the side of the former. The TMC’s share stood above 40%.

The BJP’s new candidate is Kartik Pal, who was once the chairman of the TMC-run Kaliaganj municipality. The Left-backed Congress candidate is former three-time Left MLA Ali Imran Ramz. While the TMC hopes to eat into BJP’s votes by fielding a former BJP legislator, the Left-Congress hopes this would push some Muslim voters towards the alliance.

Such splits in Muslim votes – though at varying extents – are also expected in other parts of the state. According to Abdul Matin, a political scientist at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Muslim votes are expected to split sharply in the three Muslim-majority districts but the intensity of the split will be less in south Bengal, where the TMC is organisationally a lot stronger.

“The TMC’s hegemony over Muslim votes will surely weaken, more in northern and central Bengal and less in the south. Upset with the TMC’s corruption and mis-governance, a section of Muslims are looking for an alternative and will be voting for the Left-Congress alliance or the ISF in some pockets of south Bengal, even if not in large numbers,” he told The Wire.

In Murshidabad district and some South Bengal seats, several heavyweights are in the fray where Muslims can determine their fate.

This is the first of a two-part series on on Muslim voting in West Bengal.