76 PARLIAMENTARIAN l JULY 201901
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mamata had promised
radical change for the
people of the state left
ruined by the left rule
party hoodlums have formed
‘syndicates’ that extort
people everywhere,
especially in real estate
though there have been
marginal improvements in
women’s and girls’
programmes, this is a pittance
mamata has tied up with
election master strategist
prashant kishor, but this
will not protect her
cHaNdaN NaNdY
Chandan Nandy is a senior, Delhi-based
journalist with decades of experience,
especially in political coverage
and analysissnapshots
junkets and policies sounded more
like jokes. Credible stories leaked
that some of her closest party
colleagues, including ministers, had
amassed huge wealth and had taken
to unrelenting loot.
Suddenly, the promises of
parivartan and ma-maati-maanush
began to sound hollow. Doubts were
raised about Mamata’s ability to
govern. To ward off growing public
anger, she announced schemes,
which were really doles and
showering of patronage. And yet, the
people of Bengal persisted with her,
voting her and the TMC in for a
second term.
By this time, a diff erent kind of
affl iction appeared to have struck
her: as a means to hold on to her
most-valued constituency, the
Muslims, Mamata took to unbridled
appeasement, which had the
unintended consequence of
polarising the Hindus.polarising hindus
Th e embrace of the Muslims grew
tighter and tighter still. Th is too had
its unintended consequence: the
drift among several Bengali Hindu
communities towards the BJP picked
up a rapid pace. Th is was certainly
not lost on Mamata, who found this
alarming enough to assuage the
sentiments of the majority
community. But cracks had begun
to appear on the ramparts.
It took just about three years for
the force of public anger to breach
the dam: the BJP, whose vote share
stood at 17 per cent following the
2016 assembly elections, steam-
rolled the seemingly unbreakable
TMC’s party machinery to win 18 of
42 Lok Sabha seats in May when the
parliamentary election results were
announced.How could this be achieved? Aft er
all, the BJP was always an anathema
as far as Bengalis were concerned.
From the heydays of the Left Front
which too had carefully cultivated
the state’s Muslims, albeit with
liberal public doses of secularism
and protection of minority rights,
the BJP had for years been a pariah
political party, always on the fringe.
Before we embark on how the BJP
could dramatically turn its electoral
fortunes around, an examination of
the rapid decline in the popularity
of the Trinamool Congress and its
supremo is in place.economy in ruins
Speaking to the Parliamentarian,
Kolkata-based veteran journalist
and political analyst Subir Bhaumik
said that much of the problems that
Mamata is faced with today are a
creation of her own a result of her
own folly. “Mamata should have
gone for resurrecting Bengal’s
traditional strength in
manufacturing. Having come to
power through the Singur-politics|west Bengal