It might be an understatement to call the victory of the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal’s civic elections as extraordinary. The outcome of Sunday’s vote was, in point of fact, truly phenomenal.
The state’s ruling party now has 102 of the 108 municipalities, that went to polls under its belt ~ decidedly a curtain-raiser to Mamata Banerjee’s spirited campaign for the Samajwadi Party on the eve of the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. This performance in the civic elections has reinforced Trinamul’s victory in the five quangos where elections were held a couple of weeks ago. The striking feature of the latest tryst with democracy must be that the Bharatiya Janata Party has been decimated.
The Left has won the Teherpur municipality in Nadia district, and the newly-formed Hamro Party has captured Darjeeling municipality. Arguably, the latter victory lends a new dimension to the dynamics of hill politics, roiled for close to four decades by the spirited demand for statehood (since 1986). Crucially, the Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha has drawn a blank this year.
More basically, almost throughout the state, with the notable exception of Contai in East Midnapore, Trinamul has won almost 86 per cent of the wards after winning more than 89 per cent in the five civic corporations where the vote was recently conducted.
The result of Sunday’s election reaffirms that Trinamul has regained the ground that it had lost to the BJP since 2019. The saffronite party, which was at the helm of 65 out of 108 civic bodies during Assembly elections in 2021, has failed to win any of them. The prominent among the BJP activists, pre-eminently Suvendu Adhikari, Dilip Ghosh and Arjun Singh, failed to ensure a victory for their party even on their home turf. The Left will be encouraged by its performance.
It has more than doubled its vote-share from less than 6 per cent in the Assembly elections to around 14.2 per cent. It has captured 56 wards in addition to a civic body in the Nadia district. Does the psephological swing suggest that a percentage of the anti-Trinamul vote has made its way back to the Left from the BJP?
Clearly, the Left has benefited from the work done by its student and youth wings over the past two years, specifically since the outbreak of Covid-19. No less a conspicuous facet has been the outstanding performance of Independents ~ by and large dissidents who had been expelled by the Trinamul Congress and had refused to withdraw from the fray in favour of official nominees.
Indeed, Independents have won 119 wards, which is more than twice the tallies of the Left and the Congress. A pie-chart would indicate the quirky fact that Independents represent the second political force after the Trinamul. The Left has beaten the BJP in terms of vote-share. At least 33 civic bodies will be run without the Opposition. A brute majority does have to contend with its disadvantages. But that need not detain us here.