Pre-poll surveys in Bengal may be offering different results, but there is consensus that the BJP is now a force in the state.
While the C-Voter survey—done for ABP News and Times Now—sees Mamata Banerjee’s All-India Trinamool Congress winning the state, a survey of all 294 constituencies done till December for People’s Pulse by political scientist Sajjan Kumar offers the BJP a clear edge and predicts its rise to power in the state with a clear majority. His survey gives the party anything between roughly 160 and 200 seats out of 294.
What is important in terms of political processes—rather than viewing the election as a marker of prestige for either Narendra Modi or Mamata Banerjee —is that the BJP may rise from a mere three seats in the last assembly elections in the state to a tally that is likely to be in triple digits.
By any account, this is a phenomenal rise—comparable only to its storming of Tripura after having been virtually absent in the state—irrespective of how the injury to Mamata Banerjee impacts the polls, if at all.
Sajjan Kumar’s 49-page report makes for an interesting reading and shows the pattern of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls holding, and even intensifying, in the state. However, more important than who among the two contenders for power will finally win the state is a study of the social base that the BJP has been able to carve out in the state.
The BJP was till a decade back largely seen as a north Indian, upper caste, party, with some ‘Sanskritised’ OBC groups backing it. This gave the party a decent tally but it never came close to a victory on its own in Lok Sabha polls. However, post-2014, it has not just consolidated its core states in the north and west by making deep inroads among the OBCs and sections of Dalits but also expanded geographically in the east.
Bengal model of Hindutva?
In Bengal, a major eastern state, the BJP seems to be clawing its way to electoral success by becoming the favoured party of Dalits and Adivasis in rural areas. The TMC could edge past the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls only because it did better in Kolkata and areas near it. The BJP had done phenomenally well in high SC/ST concentration districts in north Bengal and Jangalmahal, etc.
The party won Darjeeling, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar, Raiganj, Balurghat, Malda North, Ranaghat, Bongaon, Barrackpore, Hooghly, Bankura, Bishnupur, Purulia, Jhargram, Medinipur, Asansol and Bardhaman-Durgapur. Its vote share jumped from 17 percent to over 40 percent.
There is indeed an element of Bengali exceptionalism here. It isn’t what is referred to by this name in a clichéd sense, meaning Bengal’s cultural distinctiveness from other states. Rather, the model of Hindutva that Bengal is bringing up is bottom-up. Hindutva here is more popular among the Dalits and Adivasis than among the cosmopolitan Bhadralok, whose huge material and educational edge over Dalits and tribals had made Bengali culture synonymous with Bhadralok culture in the eyes of people outside Bengal.
While Sajjan Kumar says that the BJP’s surge is largely because of anti-incumbency, a victory may indeed result in a Bengal-specific Hindutva because of the patterns talked about above.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the matriarch of the Matua Mahasangh, Binapana Devi or Boro Ma, in 2018. This was a symbolic gesture that reached out to an alternative Bengali identity, that of the Namsudra Dalits. The CPI (M) had made deep inroads among the ‘low castes’ as it rose to power decades back, largely because of refugee resettlement and Operation Barga (tenancy reforms), but it did so on class rather than caste lines. Mamata Banerjee did start appealing to primordial identities, but it was the BJP that capitalised on this.
The party’s Bengal chief Dilip Ghosh is an OBC, something not too common in a state where the top leadership of both the CPI (M) and the TMC has been upper caste.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act also reaches out to the Dalit refugees/immigrants, as “being Hindu” makes them hope that, unlike any Muslim refugee from Bangladesh, they can become Indian citizens. The law, which has been criticised as discriminatory by many liberal scholars and lawyers, works to bind Dalits strongly to Hindutva, as it at once includes Dalit refugees but excludes Muslims.
Outsider-insider binary
The TMC is trying to bring up the outsider-vs-insider binary, but this may not work very well. The reason: the deepest investment in the Bhadralok idea of Bengal is among the Kolkata elite and some other urban middle class and largely upper-caste sections of the literati. Among the rural populace—the Dalits and Adivasis in particular—this neat notion of Bengali exceptionalism may not work.
Unlike a deep and thick sense of distinctive Tamil identity among the non-Brahmin majority in Tamil Nadu, the Bhadralok sense of Bengali identity largely reflects a view from the upper crust of society.
If the BJP indeed wins or even comes a close second, the notion of Bengali exceptionalism may bite the dust, and Bengal may appear much more similar to north India than is generally thought.
However, the fact that the ‘lower castes and marginal groups’ are at the heart of this political change offers a new kind of Bengali exceptionalism. Unlike north and western India, where the BJP took cities and the upper castes first and then expanded into villages and among OBCs and some Dalits, the Bengal Hindutva model is bottom-up: it is heavily rural and “low caste”.
Some years back, Sajjan Kumar coined the term subaltern Hindutva to explain this phenomenon of subaltern support to Hindutva.
Added to this success of Hindutva in marshalling caste identities in a state where the hegemonic Bhadralok denied caste and normalised its culture as Bengali culture is a local-level anti-incumbency in the state because of allegations of corruption and political violence against the TMC. The only beneficiary of this is the BJP, as the left and Congress are seen to be incapable of taking on the TMC. Political violence has also led many former left workers to shift to the BJP: activist and economist Prasenjit Bose has estimated the shift to have been more than a crore votes in 2019.
‘Jai Shri Ram’
The BJP has repeatedly employed the slogan ‘Jai Shri Ram’, which Sajjan Kumar says is largely to provoke the TMC. It, he adds, acts like an anti-TMC war cry.
Eminent economist Amartya Sen had said that the slogan is not part of Bengali culture. It’s a different matter that many Marwaris and Biharis—the Hindi Bhashis, who are an integral part of Bengal—have been Ram worshippers. The BJP, however, was not deterred. Apart from the celebration of some Bengali cultural icons—wherein critics pointed out that the party did not understand the state’s culture well—the party kept on employing ‘Jai Shri Ram’ as a slogan, even provoking Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee by raising the slogan when she was to address a gathering where the Prime Minister was present.
On the one hand, the slogan serves to provoke the TMC and, on the other, it seeks to undermine a very Bhadralok idea of Bengali exceptionalism and a Bengali Hinduism that is different from north Indian Hinduism. The message is clear: the BJP wants to challenge and disrupt this notion of Bengal being different and culturally coherent to beat the TMC’s insider-outsider pitch.
Jyoti Basu had once said, in response to Mandal Commission, that Bengal had just two castes: the rich and the poor. However, the subtlety of caste in the state—unlike north India, where it often plays out in terms of dominance and subordination—failed to empower the ‘lower castes’. The state saw upper castes dominating most fields, from top-level politics to academics, to the
world of art and culture.
The SCs and STs together account for about 29-percent of the population of the state and are numerically powerful in many pockets. Caste has finally entered the political world of Bengal. However, unlike in Tamil Nadu, where the non-Brahmin movement led to a distinctive regional-linguistic identity that Hindutva has little chance of breaching, Hindutva seems at the moment the prime beneficiary of the growing caste consciousness in the state.
And the fact that Hindutva has been associated with a Brahmanical worldview does not really matter in Bengal, for the subtle model of caste that has operated in the state makes critiques of Brahmanism toothless there.
Whether it wins or loses narrowly, Hindutva in its Bengal model has disrupted some stereotypes about the state. And as the CAA can indeed polarise the state on Hindu-Muslim lines, the BJP’s surge is likely to have implications for community relations in Bengal.
A BJP victory, in other words, may make Bengal very different from what it has been for over half a century now.
—Vikas Pathak is a media academic and journalist. The views expressed are personal
While the C-Voter survey—done for ABP News and Times Now—sees Mamata Banerjee’s All-India Trinamool Congress winning the state, a survey of all 294 constituencies done till December for People’s Pulse by political scientist Sajjan Kumar offers the BJP a clear edge and predicts its rise to power in the state with a clear majority. His survey gives the party anything between roughly 160 and 200 seats out of 294.
What is important in terms of political processes—rather than viewing the election as a marker of prestige for either Narendra Modi or Mamata Banerjee —is that the BJP may rise from a mere three seats in the last assembly elections in the state to a tally that is likely to be in triple digits.
By any account, this is a phenomenal rise—comparable only to its storming of Tripura after having been virtually absent in the state—irrespective of how the injury to Mamata Banerjee impacts the polls, if at all.
Sajjan Kumar’s 49-page report makes for an interesting reading and shows the pattern of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls holding, and even intensifying, in the state. However, more important than who among the two contenders for power will finally win the state is a study of the social base that the BJP has been able to carve out in the state.
The BJP was till a decade back largely seen as a north Indian, upper caste, party, with some ‘Sanskritised’ OBC groups backing it. This gave the party a decent tally but it never came close to a victory on its own in Lok Sabha polls. However, post-2014, it has not just consolidated its core states in the north and west by making deep inroads among the OBCs and sections of Dalits but also expanded geographically in the east.
Bengal model of Hindutva?
In Bengal, a major eastern state, the BJP seems to be clawing its way to electoral success by becoming the favoured party of Dalits and Adivasis in rural areas. The TMC could edge past the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls only because it did better in Kolkata and areas near it. The BJP had done phenomenally well in high SC/ST concentration districts in north Bengal and Jangalmahal, etc.
The party won Darjeeling, Alipurduar, Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar, Raiganj, Balurghat, Malda North, Ranaghat, Bongaon, Barrackpore, Hooghly, Bankura, Bishnupur, Purulia, Jhargram, Medinipur, Asansol and Bardhaman-Durgapur. Its vote share jumped from 17 percent to over 40 percent.
There is indeed an element of Bengali exceptionalism here. It isn’t what is referred to by this name in a clichéd sense, meaning Bengal’s cultural distinctiveness from other states. Rather, the model of Hindutva that Bengal is bringing up is bottom-up. Hindutva here is more popular among the Dalits and Adivasis than among the cosmopolitan Bhadralok, whose huge material and educational edge over Dalits and tribals had made Bengali culture synonymous with Bhadralok culture in the eyes of people outside Bengal.
While Sajjan Kumar says that the BJP’s surge is largely because of anti-incumbency, a victory may indeed result in a Bengal-specific Hindutva because of the patterns talked about above.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the matriarch of the Matua Mahasangh, Binapana Devi or Boro Ma, in 2018. This was a symbolic gesture that reached out to an alternative Bengali identity, that of the Namsudra Dalits. The CPI (M) had made deep inroads among the ‘low castes’ as it rose to power decades back, largely because of refugee resettlement and Operation Barga (tenancy reforms), but it did so on class rather than caste lines. Mamata Banerjee did start appealing to primordial identities, but it was the BJP that capitalised on this.
The party’s Bengal chief Dilip Ghosh is an OBC, something not too common in a state where the top leadership of both the CPI (M) and the TMC has been upper caste.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act also reaches out to the Dalit refugees/immigrants, as “being Hindu” makes them hope that, unlike any Muslim refugee from Bangladesh, they can become Indian citizens. The law, which has been criticised as discriminatory by many liberal scholars and lawyers, works to bind Dalits strongly to Hindutva, as it at once includes Dalit refugees but excludes Muslims.
Outsider-insider binary
The TMC is trying to bring up the outsider-vs-insider binary, but this may not work very well. The reason: the deepest investment in the Bhadralok idea of Bengal is among the Kolkata elite and some other urban middle class and largely upper-caste sections of the literati. Among the rural populace—the Dalits and Adivasis in particular—this neat notion of Bengali exceptionalism may not work.
Unlike a deep and thick sense of distinctive Tamil identity among the non-Brahmin majority in Tamil Nadu, the Bhadralok sense of Bengali identity largely reflects a view from the upper crust of society.
If the BJP indeed wins or even comes a close second, the notion of Bengali exceptionalism may bite the dust, and Bengal may appear much more similar to north India than is generally thought.
However, the fact that the ‘lower castes and marginal groups’ are at the heart of this political change offers a new kind of Bengali exceptionalism. Unlike north and western India, where the BJP took cities and the upper castes first and then expanded into villages and among OBCs and some Dalits, the Bengal Hindutva model is bottom-up: it is heavily rural and “low caste”.
Some years back, Sajjan Kumar coined the term subaltern Hindutva to explain this phenomenon of subaltern support to Hindutva.
Added to this success of Hindutva in marshalling caste identities in a state where the hegemonic Bhadralok denied caste and normalised its culture as Bengali culture is a local-level anti-incumbency in the state because of allegations of corruption and political violence against the TMC. The only beneficiary of this is the BJP, as the left and Congress are seen to be incapable of taking on the TMC. Political violence has also led many former left workers to shift to the BJP: activist and economist Prasenjit Bose has estimated the shift to have been more than a crore votes in 2019.
‘Jai Shri Ram’
The BJP has repeatedly employed the slogan ‘Jai Shri Ram’, which Sajjan Kumar says is largely to provoke the TMC. It, he adds, acts like an anti-TMC war cry.
Eminent economist Amartya Sen had said that the slogan is not part of Bengali culture. It’s a different matter that many Marwaris and Biharis—the Hindi Bhashis, who are an integral part of Bengal—have been Ram worshippers. The BJP, however, was not deterred. Apart from the celebration of some Bengali cultural icons—wherein critics pointed out that the party did not understand the state’s culture well—the party kept on employing ‘Jai Shri Ram’ as a slogan, even provoking Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee by raising the slogan when she was to address a gathering where the Prime Minister was present.
On the one hand, the slogan serves to provoke the TMC and, on the other, it seeks to undermine a very Bhadralok idea of Bengali exceptionalism and a Bengali Hinduism that is different from north Indian Hinduism. The message is clear: the BJP wants to challenge and disrupt this notion of Bengal being different and culturally coherent to beat the TMC’s insider-outsider pitch.
Jyoti Basu had once said, in response to Mandal Commission, that Bengal had just two castes: the rich and the poor. However, the subtlety of caste in the state—unlike north India, where it often plays out in terms of dominance and subordination—failed to empower the ‘lower castes’. The state saw upper castes dominating most fields, from top-level politics to academics, to the
world of art and culture.
The SCs and STs together account for about 29-percent of the population of the state and are numerically powerful in many pockets. Caste has finally entered the political world of Bengal. However, unlike in Tamil Nadu, where the non-Brahmin movement led to a distinctive regional-linguistic identity that Hindutva has little chance of breaching, Hindutva seems at the moment the prime beneficiary of the growing caste consciousness in the state.
And the fact that Hindutva has been associated with a Brahmanical worldview does not really matter in Bengal, for the subtle model of caste that has operated in the state makes critiques of Brahmanism toothless there.
Whether it wins or loses narrowly, Hindutva in its Bengal model has disrupted some stereotypes about the state. And as the CAA can indeed polarise the state on Hindu-Muslim lines, the BJP’s surge is likely to have implications for community relations in Bengal.
A BJP victory, in other words, may make Bengal very different from what it has been for over half a century now.
—Vikas Pathak is a media academic and journalist. The views expressed are personal
First Published: Mar 15, 2021 5:12 PM IST
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