West Bengal Elections 2016: Mamata charisma turned out to be the game changer

This assembly election was a battle between Mamata Banerjee on one side and the Congress-Left alliance and a nondescript BJP on the other. With 211 seats — a significant improvement from the last assembly tally — the 2016 results are a landslide in her favour. The opposition is reduced to a rump. Nothing worked in its favour. On the contrary, trying to mine the Narada and Saradha scams, the central Kolkata flyover collapse and crying hoarse over TMC-sponsored violence have proved to be counter-productive. The people of Bengal had overwhelmingly voted to give her a brute majority.

Who pulled the rug from under the Left? Well, the Left itself. In hindsight, the alliance turned out to be a hara-kiri for the CPI-M, evident from the decline in vote-share and seat count. After losing 28 seats, the front is now a fringe player in a state which had been its stronghold for 34 years. The CPI-M’s drubbing will not go down well with the central leadership, especially Prakash Karat who was opposed to the tie-up with the Congress. The Congress piggybacking on the CPI-M has only marginally benefited, having increased its count by two seats. 

There are several factors behind the Left’s decimation. One of them is it had underestimated Banerjee’s charisma. To say the people love her would be a tad exaggeration, but they certainly do not want the Left to return. The Red rule still conjures up depressing memories. The Left Front’s credibility nosedived further when a section of its loyal supporters saw the alliance as opportunism. It’s not hard to imagine the people’s exasperation with the CPI-M. Surjya Kanta Mishra, the face of the alliance and its chief ministerial candidate, lost by a huge margin. 

The Left’s blunders have definitely helped the Trinamool Congress, but Banerjee has also played her cards well. She may not have brought big-ticket projects to the state, but her dole politics has kept Bengal’s workforce — 98 per cent of which work in the unorganised sector — happy. In rural Bengal, welfare measures like grains at Rs2 per kilo, financial incentives for girl child’s education and distributing freebies like bicycles have helped her in good measure. The state has come down to a level where the people have realised the impossibility of attracting huge investments for industries, a la Gujarat and Maharashtra. They are satisfied even if Bengal’s financial prospects appear bleaker than never before. Banerjee’s other trump card has been providing free housing to the extremely poor in six backward districts and offering employment to villagers in the once Naxal-dominated Junglemahal.

Ironically, though the BJP’s vote-share has decreased, it still played the party pooper for the alliance. What perhaps explains TMC’s clean sweep in Kolkata, which has traditionally voted against the incumbent, has been the saffron party’s rise at the cost of the Congress and CPI-M. The BJP had eaten into the support base of these two parties, thus paving the way for TMC’s victory in multi-cornered fights. The same phenomenon was at work in other parts of Bengal as well. 

Moreover, the TMC’s unprecedented victory has also come with inroads into those districts which were still propping up the Left. Today, the CPI-M is on the verge of extinction in Bengal. Its saving grace are Tripura and Kerala, though the former will soon be Banerjee’s hunting ground. She has major plans to increase TMC’s footprint.