Nandigram holds the key to winning West Bengal elections

Mamata Banerjee’s decision to contest the upcoming state Assembly elections from Nandigram mirrors a larger and more heated political battle panning out in Bengal. It is also the first time in her four-decade-old political career that the West Bengal CM has chosen to fight from outside her traditional south Kolkata seats.One of the chief reasons for her decision is an attempt to even out the fissures that have emerged among the one lakh-odd party voters after her trusted lieutenant Suvendu Adhikari (who had won the seat in 2016) defected to the BJP on December 16 last year, three months before the polls were announced in Bengal. Adhikari, 50, will now take on the chief minister in Nandigram as it goes to polls on April 1 in the second phase of the election.Both Mamata and Adhikari have played a decisive role in the Purba Medinipur district. Nandigram, along with Singur, was the hotbed of a violent and bloody anti-land acquisition struggle in 2007 that ultimately catapulted the Trinamool Congress supremo to power in West Bengal in 2011, putting an end to the 34-year-old Left front government. “I may forget my name, but not Nandigram. I have always wanted to contest from either Nandigram or Singur,” Banerjee said earlier this week. Today the BJP is posing a serious challenge to break the TMC in the same place where it fought fiercely and formed itself. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}(); Religious fault linesNandigram in East Midnapore is a coastal district bordering Odisha, which partly reflects Bengal’s demography. The predominantly rural belt comprises two administrative blocks and 17 gram panchayats. According to the 2011 Census, Nandigram-1 Block, which was the epicentre of the anti-land acquisition movement, has an over two-lakh population comprising 42,289 households, out of which 70,786 are Muslims and 1.3 lakhs are Hindus. The Nandigram-II Block is a slightly different case. Among the one-lakh people who live here, only 14,940 are Muslims. According to electoral roll data, Nandigram has around 2.5 lakh voters (in both blocks). Trinamool Congress has been consistently polling over one-lakh votes in Nandigram in the past decade. medium nocaption81452498Mamata, in her first party workers conference in Nandigram, on March 9, had asked the BJP “not to play the Hindu card”. She had also criticised her opponents for playing the “70:30” game. While Adhikari, on the face of it, maintains he respects “manav dharma” (humanity). In the midst of launching his political campaign in Nandigram, Adhikari claimed that Mamata had “wrongly recited” the Chandipath mantra and was hence “insulting Bengal’s culture”. He also repeatedly used the word “jihadis” to blame the attack on BJP workers on December 29, two weeks after he joined BJP.While bringing in a religious binary may be a new import to Nandigram politics, religion has always played a central theme in the region. Among the most common images of the Nandigram movement were the women leading the siege and blowing conch shells to alert against possible police intruders. Gokulnagar, home to Vaishnavites – along with Sonachura – had borne the brunt of the March 14, 2007 police firing in which 14 persons were killed. Even as one drives to Nandigram from NH-16, the last bus stop, before entering Nandigram, is Pir Mandir. “Pir Mandirs are very common in Nandigram. The Satya Pir Sthan here is frequented by Hindus who offer milk to Pir Baba after a calf is born,” explained a local. Oddly enough, locals here cannot recollect when the Pir Sthan became a Pir Mandir.Pabitra Kar, former RSS pracharak and a widely-respected BJP leader in Nandigram-II Block, maintains that the region always had a sizeable BJP support base. “The numbers were not high, but these are dedicated party supporters,” he said. “The first significant increase in the BJP support base was evident in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. From 10,000 in 2016 Bengal Assembly polls, it shot up to over 62,268 in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The sharpest gains were made in Nandigram-II Block. Suvendu Babu knows this place like the back of his hand. We are confident of winning.”Abu Taher, Trinamool Congress leader and one of the main faces of the Nandigram movement, dismissed these claims, and attributed the BJP emergence in the region to the CPM supporters who joined the BJP in substantial numbers. “The faces are the same, only the party flags have changed,” he said, adding that the Left vote share in 2019 Lok Sabha dipped by 44,000 in Nandigram compared to 2016 Assembly polls.Mamata’s campaign managers are only too aware of the religious fault lines this time around. Taking the battle to her opponent’s turf, Banerjee chose to stay in a rented home in Nandigram-II Block’s Reyapara, where BJP has made significant leads. Among the 11 temples she had visited earlier this week in her first campaign trail in Nandigram, most were in Nandigram-II Block. Tarashankar Chatterjee, the Shiv temple priest, where Banerjee had gone before filing her nominations, on March 10, told us: “Suvendu Babu heads our temple managing committee. Several people, including him, come to our temple, but we have never had any chief minister come here before.” Adhikari visited the same temple the next day.The attackThe events on Wednesday evening, which led to Mamata’s ankle injury in Nandigram, hours after filing her nomination, has infused a sense of anxiety among the locals. Trinamool Congress party workers have begun leading protest rallies against this “deliberate attack” and are praying in temples and Pir shrines for her early recovery, according to Sukendu Sekhar Ray, Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha chief whip, who is now camping in Nandigram. While some BJP leaders have questioned the timing of the injury, passing it off as a “political ploy”, several leaders have also condemned it, and wished the CM an early recovery. medium nocaption81450203No doubt, for people in Bengal, images of an injured Mamata are emotionally stirring. They have already sprung up memories of how she was hit on her head with a stick during a rally at Hazra Crossing in Kolkata, the impact of which had fractured her skull in 1990. Kolkata South, which saw her campaign with a bandaged head, had elected her to Lok Sabha six-times in a row from 1991 to 2011. Bengal, however, has never seen images of a sitting chief minister being taken on a stretcher to the SSKM Woodburn Ward. Its implications in a poll-bound state, where Mamata is pitted against Prime Minister Modi, who comes to the state armed with a battery of central ministers and chief ministers from BJP, can be gauged by her and her party’s appeals to maintain “calm and peace”. The CM on March 11 said she will be back in the field in “two-to-three” daysThere are also several other factors which are playing out in Nandigram that can tilt the elections either way. Suvendu Adhikari and his supporters have a strong foothold in several agricultural-cooperative banks in this region. Edging them out today are the much smaller state-run agricultural cooperative societies, which have a larger footprint, but can only provide small ticket-size loans, where TMC leaders still hold sway. These banks and societies provide seasonal micro-credit to farmers. In this agrarian belt, among the 69,000-odd households surveyed in 2011 by Census enumerators, around 8,000 were classified as urban homes. Rough estimates peg around 30,000 local youths from Nandigram that have migrated to other states, mostly to work in hosiery units.Hit by the pandemic, the villagers now depend greatly on lending. The reason lies in the shifting agricultural pattern. Villagers in these parts are also increasingly taking to prawn cultivation, emptying sacks of salt in the once lush green paddy fields to make it saline. “I had five bighas of farmland where I used to cultivate mostly paddy. I had also fought hard alongside other villagers to protect our farmlands prior to the 2011 elections. But over the years, the gains from paddy cultivation have waned, and now, like many other villagers in our village, I have converted the farmland into a water body where I cultivate prawn,” said Manoranjan Mali, a resident of Mohammadpur village in Nandigram. Alamgir Hossein, a senior leader of the Bhenami prawn cultivators in the area, said, “We want political parties to facilitate cold storages and smoother exports to foreign nations like US, China and Japan for the cultivators.” Covid has hit the exports hard. medium81462014Mamata, in a major policy decision, has said the state will develop the Tajpur deep seaport (in this district) on its own, and develop it into an import-export zone. The state has already floated an Expression of Interest for it on December 29. In the 2021 Union budget, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that Petuaghat fishing harbour (also in the district) will be given renewed impetus.Employment opportunities, and the lack of it, are also featuring in the political speeches here. Mamata has promised to make Nandigram a prime model, with a special mention in the party manifesto. Adhikari, meanwhile, has attacked the TMC government of being riddled by scams and failing to provide jobs.“The battle for Nandigram is bringing to the fore all the issues that are resonating in Bengal’s political landscape, like religious binary, defection, unemployment…,” said Biswanath Chakraborty, political analyst and Rabindra Bharati University professor. “There’s also the anti-incumbency factor.”For Mamata, winning Nandigram is not only a matter of prestige, it is also personal. With polls in less than a month, the future of Bengal politics will be decided here in the next few days.