The BJP’s West Bengal gamble

For a party that won just three Assembly seats in 2016 to being the principle Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly in 2021 with 77 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come a long way. Yet, according to senior party strategists, it still needs to identify its electoral base — not just the hard-core Sangh Parivar cohort, but also the anti-Trinamool Congress and Left Front voters, who cast their votes strategically.

As the BJP settles down to chart out a strategy for the upcoming Assembly elections, two approaches are gaining traction. The first seeks to appeal to Sangh Parivar-aligned voters and the second seeks to attract an anti-Trinamool and largely Left Front voter base.

The first approach focuses on polarisation, framed around the narrative of infiltration from Bangladesh. This promotes the idea that a porous border facilitates such movement and that the State government is not willing to cooperate with the Centre in controlling it as it wants support from minority voters.

This narrative is particularly popular in districts along the porous India-Bangladesh border, including parts of North Bengal and stretches of South and Central Bengal. And the recently concluded general elections in Bangladesh have helped bolster it. While the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won the elections with 212 seats and promised to protect minority Hindus, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) party-led coalition won 77 out of the 300 seats in Parliament, with the JeI itself winning a record 68 seats, making it the principle opposition party. Many of the JeI’s seats are concentrated in the border regions, including the Khulna division. For the BJP, this fact adds weight to its narrative of infiltration and changing demographics in these areas, which will help polarise the electorate in its favour. The BJP performed well in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in these regions, but did not perform as well in the 2021 Assembly elections.

The second point gaining traction is the party’s realisation of which voters drove its surge in the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2021 Assembly polls. They were, surprisingly, largely former Left Front supporters.

In the 2016 Assembly elections, the Left-Congress alliance received a vote share of 38.1% and a seat share of 77. The BJP secured only 10.2% of the vote share and three seats. In the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP’s vote share increased significantly to 38.1%. It won 77 seats — the same number that the Left-Congress alliance had won in 2016. This showed that most of the anti-Trinamool Congress voters had shifted to the BJP.

What is more significant is that in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP got 18 seats and 40.2% of the vote share, which, if extrapolated to Assembly segments, translated into dominance in 121 of them. Yet, the 2021 Assembly elections showed that some of the anti-Trinamool votes that had gone to the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls returned to the Left–Congress alliance. Recovering the vote share to the 2019 levels is part of the BJP’s strategy now.

For example, in around 49 seats in the Greater Kolkata area where the BJP routinely performs poorly, the Left retained second place in several seats and held on to portions of its vote. BJP backroom strategists are now reaching out to local Left supporters, trying to convince them that, in the absence of a Left-Congress alliance, the only way to defeat the Trinamool is to consolidate their votes behind the BJP more than they did in the past.

The party is using the anti-incumbency narrative against the three-term Trinamool Congress government, to convince floating voters, not aligned at any level with the BJP, that the national party is their best bet to vote out the Trinamool government. This is what West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya said when he took over the post in July last year: “Leave all ideologies aside and come together to remove Trinamool from power. Then you can raise your flag and find your own path again. There will be a space for Opposition.”

An election campaign and strategy involves many moving parts — a patchwork of narratives, demographics, and arithmetic. Winning over voters from an ideological rival to strategically block a third, more dominant force is not a new tactic, but it comes with challenges. It requires psychological operations and a covert communications strategy, which often fail. Yet, if executed well, this complex strategy can make even seemingly impossible outcomes possible. And that is precisely what the BJP hopes to aacheve cessfully in West Bengal.