West Bengal elections: Bid to retain power won’t be easy for Mamata Banerjee

Kolkata: By the time the assembly election is over, Mamata Banerjee will have walked at least 400-500km campaigning for her Trinamool Congress (TMC), says a close aide. “You will never see her perched atop a utility vehicle waving at people; she walks,” says this person, asking not to be identified.

Whether in Kolkata or in the hinterlands of West Bengal, that’s how the chief minister is reaching out to 65.5 million voters as she faces a spirited challenge from an alliance of the Left parties and the Congress. And if she had the time, she would campaign for her candidates in all the 294 constituencies.

At an election rally last month, Banerjee told supporters that her party’s candidates themselves were not really important: in every constituency, they should vote for her, she said, projecting herself as the face of every TMC candidate in the fray.

Back in 2011, when the TMC had ended the Left Front’s 34-year rule, people had voted for change. Banerjee was the one who led it from the front. This time around, the change agent is seeking a second term on the strength of her “very own brand of development and redistribution”, says the aide cited above.

But several fast-unfolding adversities are queering the pitch for Banerjee.

Early opinion polls had predicted a sterile election and an overwhelming victory for the TMC. But the contest has suddenly livened up with the Left parties and the Congress coming together to form an alliance, and the release of a video footage that has dragged the TMC into a bribery scandal.

Controversies aren’t new to the TMC: some of its leaders were alleged to have helped fraudsters to ply ponzi schemes. For years, they have been facing probes by agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate, but Banerjee has backed them all so much that one of the candidates—Madan Mitra—will contest from jail this year.

She had the courage to field Mitra because allegations of corruption without proof of criminality have not had any discernable impact on the TMC’s performance in the elections that the party had fought in the past few years—in the 2014 general election, it won 34 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha constituencies amid widespread protests over the collapse of ponzi schemes.

But a section of the party’s grassroots fears the latest controversy stirred up by a fledgling news portal could be more damaging than any other in the past.

On 14 March, Narada News released a video footage which showed top TMC leaders—MPs, cabinet ministers in West Bengal and top party functionaries—receiving cash, either directly or through proxies, from the representative of a fictitious company.

The party has challenged the video footage, calling it a conspiracy to tarnish its image in people’s minds ahead of the election, and its law firm Fox and Mandal has issued notices to several news organizations, including Mint, asking them to retract what they reported and to stop further reporting about the Narada News video footage.

But the discomfort within the TMC leadership is increasingly making its way into public discussions. One of its MPs, Dinesh Trivedi, who served briefly as the railway minister, said at a panel discussion in New Delhi on 26 March that had he been the party chief, he would have asked all leaders shown in the video to “sit at home” until they could clear their names.

On the same day, another MP, Saugata Roy, who is among those seen on the Narada News video footage receiving cash, said at an election rally in Kolkata that he was “sad and ashamed” for getting entangled in the controversy, while asking voters to punish him, and not his party, if he couldn’t come clean.

Narada News claims to have paid TMC leaders ₹ 73 lakh in cash, and almost all of it secretly recorded on an iPhone. Such sensational stuff is unprecedented in West Bengal, and not surprisingly, corruption has become the mainstay of the opposition’s previously toothless and uninspiring campaign.

Allegations of corruption might not have washed with voters before, but the question this time is whether Narada News’ video footage can undermine Banerjee’s own incorruptible image of integrity.

She hasn’t faced anything like this before and it has turned out to be a serious distraction, taking up a great deal of her time at election rallies.

According to the aide cited above, the scandal would have “very limited impact, if at all, and that, too, only on urban voters”. But corruption appears to be a key issue at grassroots level pretty much across the state, says a top government official, who asked not to be identified.

The release of the video footage has given momentum to the campaign against corruption, says the official, “but if you look at wall graffiti, you would at once realize that corruption is a hyper-local issue in this year’s election across the state”.

It is at the fore, for instance, at the Jhargram constituency in the backward district of West Midnapore, where the TMC has lost a key ally, the Jharkhand Party (Naren). The reason: “corruption and backstabbing”, says Chunibala Hansda, a tribal leader of the party, who has pitched herself and her daughter in the contest against the TMC this year.

“In five years, we are completely disillusioned,” Hansda says. Backed by the Left parties, she says she is confident of defeating the TMC candidate in Jhargram because the entire tribal population in the region, which her party has traditionally held together, has given up on the ruling party.

Not just in pockets of West Midnapore, Banerjee’s government appears to be facing a wave of anti-incumbency in various parts of the state, according to the official cited above.

“It may not be a strong wave (of anti-incumbency); still considering that the Trinamool Congress has been in power for only five years, it is kind of strange,” says the official.

Another key concern for Banerjee is the alliance between the Left parties and the Congress. Together, they had in the 2014 general election polled close to 40% of votes—almost the same as the TMC.

It means—at least numerically—that they have a fighting chance of edging past Banerjee’s candidates in a large number of seats, especially in the northern districts of the state, where the Congress and the Left parties still have substantial following.

But an election is not about numbers alone.

Banerjee’s own popularity remains high, especially among rural voters, which she has earned by stepping up public spending.

The state government and the TMC’s own publications show that in the past five years, West Bengal has taken at least ₹ 2 trillion in new loans even as it repaid half of the old ones left by the previous regime. (The current debt stock is at ₹ 3 trillion, according to budget documents, up from ₹ 1.9 trillion in 2011.)

A substantial part of this money was spent on building infrastructure in backward areas. According to the TMC manifesto, the state government has in the past five years built or expanded close to 4,000km of roads; 41 new super-speciality hospitals are being built in remote interiors and most of them are to be commissioned within months; and the state is to achieve near 100% rural electrification within 2016.

The “economic and social multipliers” of such initiatives normally pay a rich political dividend, says another government official, who, too, asked not to be named.

Add to it the fact that Banerjee has been “most prolific and non-partisan” in the distribution of largesse—a whopping 2.5 million free bicycles to school-going children and cut-price food grains to 70 million economically backward families, according to the TMC manifesto—and “she has secured a place for herself in people’s hearts”, he added.

But even as she races against time to reach out to voters promising more freebies, Banerjee is being hobbled by unexpected debacles.

Last week’s collapse of an under-construction flyover in Kolkata was one such. Not only did it snuff out at least 26 lives, it opened a can of worms: the role of her government’s implementing agency is now under scanner and TMC leaders are battling more controversies.

If Banerjee returns to power, repaying the debt will be a headache, and staffing the hospitals will be a challenge, according to the officials cited above.

It’s a different question if taxpayers’ money has been “prudently” spent, and “if every penny’s worth of infrastructure” has truly been built, says one of the officials, but for now, Banerjee is only looking to cash in on the “economic and social multipliers” of public spending.

The TMC claims in its manifesto that 80 million of the state’s 90 million people have in some way or the other benefited from government schemes in the past five years.

Still, winning this election is not turning out to be the cakewalk that it was expected to be, and that’s making Banerjee walk many extra miles.