West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is alarmed. The BJP has managed to make inroads in rural Bengal — as a political alternative to her Trinamool Congress.

Until the recent general election, Mamata was confident of retaining power in West Bengal for years to come. Her principal opposition, the CPI(M)-led Left Front, is suffering from chronic paralysis. Her former ally, the Congress, is struggling to survive in the face of large scale defections to the Trinamool Congress.

While 60 per cent of the Opposition votes are divided among the LF, Congress and BJP, the consolidation of the crucial 28 per cent Muslim vote in her favour helped the Trinamool improve its seat share from 19 to 34 in the last general election. Yes, there was a sudden increase in the BJP’s vote share from 6 per cent to 17 per cent in 2014. But Mamata was confident that it was a temporary phenomenon, mostly urban in nature.

However, the recent turf war between BJP and Trinamool activists in Muslim-dominated villages such as Makra and Parui in Birbhum district, is a clear reminder that anti-Mamata voices, irrespective of religious affiliation, are taking shelter under the BJP umbrella. Nearly half-a-dozen BJP and Trinamool supporters — all Muslim — have been killed in Birbhum in the last month or so. They were divided equally between the two warring camps. The trend is similar to the polarisation of anti-Left votes in Trinamool’s favour which was seen after the Nandigram firing in March 2007.

Basically, bad news And that’s not good news for Mamata, who had borrowed her winning strategy from the Left. Having come to power in 1977, the Left divided the entire population into innumerable interest groups. Each group was converted into a beneficiary support base.

For rural Bengalis, opposing the Left meant missing out on not merely a government or public service job, but also to earning a possible livelihood through other activities. Be it rickshaw pulling or broking village land deals — every activity was cartelised. The longer the Left stayed in power, the stronger was its grip on everyday life.

Once in power, the Trinamool started its turf domination programme from exactly where the Left had ended it. The lack of a party structure compounded the problem with allegations of extortion and intimidation abounding. Any opposition was dealt with severely. This is now backfiring on the Trinamool.

A case in point is Birbhum, where the Trinamool district president Anubrata Mandal is accused of murdering his own party-man, and Monirul Islam, a prominent Trinamool leader and MLA, is accused of murdering three people. Both apparently enjoyed Mamata’s support. And, if the recent Calcutta High Court verdict (in the Sagar Dutta murder case) is any indication, the police shielded the criminals.

Cashing in Neither the Congress nor the CPI(M) are in a position to build political resistance to such a collapse of law and order. But the BJP has filled the void.

The sequence of events had set alarm bells ringing in the Trinamool camp. In a significant shift from the past, when she accused the CPI(M) and the Congress for all wrongs, Mamata is now targeting the BJP and the Narendra Modi government, in public meetings. The desperation in the Trinamool camp was evident when Mamata shared the dais with top Left leaders in Delhi this week — making a clear U-turn from her anti-Left stance. She is now eager to strike a coalition with the Left and the Congress to keep the Muslim vote bank intact.

That may not be easy. And there’s more trouble brewing. The CBI probe on the Saradha chit-fund scam and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) probe on Bangladeshi terror outfits in West Bengal have the potential to cause major embarrassments to Trinamool, sooner than later.

But can the BJP cash in? Though the party has made some progress in beefing up its organisational strength in West Bengal, it is still not in a position to take full advantage of the growing distrust of the Trinamool. There is an urgent need to put a credible Bengali face behind the State leadership. An overt dependence on either Narendra Modi’s charisma or the RSS’s organisational ability may be counter-productive. And most importantly, the party needs to realise that cow-belt rhetoric does not sit well with the Bengali psyche.

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