Opinion: Low turnout in Bengal is as worrisome for Mamata Banerjee as is for Modi

In West Bengal, fewer voters turned up at the polling booths to cast their ballot and the political establishment felt a cold chill. It was an unequivocal message of disapproval of what is on offer from the rival political parties contesting in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Second-phase voter turnout numbers confirmed the trend. Roughly, over the two phases, voter turnout across 190 seats fell by three per cent compared to 2019.

Elections deliver the verdict on how voters rate the performance of the ruling regime. Back in 2019, there was a wave of support for the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party after the Pulwama and Balakot attacks. The response was consistent with the perception that Modi was the best bet for India’s security.

For the BJP, retaining the 18 West Bengal parliamentary seats it won in 2019 is essential to reach its Mission 370 target this election. The six Bengal seats — Cooch Behar, Alipurduars, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Raiganj, and Balurghat — which have so far gone to polls are vital to this mission.

On the other side, defeating the BJP is equally imperative for the Trinamool Congress and its founder-leader Mamata Banerjee, who wants to prevent the BJP from retaining the seats it won on the back of a Pulwama-Balakot-Modi wave. Also, as a powerful and significant partner of the Indian National Inclusive Developmental Alliance, the TMC wants to win more seats and increase its heft in future decision-making.

What low votes mean for TMC and BJP

Voters who did not queue up at the polling stations in Alipurduars, Cooch Behar, and Jalpaiguri in phase one delivered a strong message to both, the incumbents and the challengers. In Cooch Behar, which was won by Union Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs Nishit Pramanik, around two per cent of voters failed to show up to press the button — from 84.08 per cent in 2019, voter turnout dropped to 82.16. In the two other seats, Alipurduars and Jalpaiguri, the number of voters who stayed away was even higher.

In the second phase, there was a 4.5 per cent decline in voting despite a high voter turnout of 76.58 per cent. But with just two completed phases in an election spread over seven, it is too early to call this a trend.

Nonetheless, it’s bad news for the BJP with its targets and expectations. It is also bad news for Mamata Banerjee, who has been working to increase her haul of 22 seats in 2019 and bring it up as close as possible to the whopping 34 seats she won, albeit in partnership with the Congress, in 2014. While her declared mission is to prevent the BJP from winning even one seat, the buzz inside the party is that if the BJP can be contained to less than 10, the relentless verbal and sometimes physical conflict will have achieved its purpose.

What can they do?

Dealing with alienated voters can be tricky. To get them to show up at the polling booths, the parties need to up their game in mobilising the stay-at-homes through either persuasion or pressure. For both ways to be effective, the parties need people and micromanagers, who know their territories like the back of their hands.

There is nothing mechanical about this exercise — it cannot be executed with people armed with a checklist. What matters most is the health of the relationship between the micromanagers and the voters; if a political party has worked at the grassroots that is its working capital. The Trinamool Congress has a lattice of relationships at the grassroots nurtured over long years of interactions.

It has the advantage of a core of support comprising women voters and a sizeable section of Muslim voters. The TMC also has the serious disadvantage of being embroiled in the jobs-for-money teachers' recruitment scandal, a ration scandal and a widespread perception that its cadres and local leaders are involved in skimming money from poor and vulnerable beneficiaries of government schemes and extortion rackets. Low voter turnout could be a reflection of pent-up anger or disapproval because people have no other safe means of delivering an unpalatable message to the party in power.

The BJP’s grassroots network is about to face the toughest test in this election in West Bengal; it will be the key to its performance in the next five phases. In places like Sandeshkhali, which is one of the seven segments of the Basirhat Lok Sabha constituency, the BJP has workers and a leader or two. It also has the advantage of a rooted Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh presence that has been working in the Sunderbans for several years. But does this body of people constitute the quality of working capital the party needs to convince its potential voters to go to the polling booths?

Borderlands

The situation can become complicated for the BJP and the Trinamool Congress in parliamentary constituencies like Basirhat, which border Bangladesh. 10 West Bengal districts and 21 out of its 42 Lok Sabha constituencies share a border with Bangladesh with substantial pockets of Muslim voters, who know they are targeted every time Modi or Amit Shah refer to “infiltrators”.

Of the six constituencies where elections have been held, Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Balurghat, and Raigunj all share a border with Bangladesh. There are significant Bengali-speaking Muslim populations in these constituencies. The rushed notification of the controversial and confusing Citizenship Amendment Act rules by the Modi regime ahead of the Lok Sabha elections was trashed by Mamata Banerjee as playing on the sentiments of people of East Bengali-Pakistani-Bangladeshi origin settled in West Bengal post-partition.

The flip side of this confrontation over identity is the BJP’s charge that the Left and the Trinamool Congress have connived at setting infiltrators, that is Muslims from across the border, to build vote banks.

Others, too, will be affected

The lower turnout also affects the two other contesting sides in the election, the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front. Voter support is fundamental to the CPI(M)’s hopes of reviving its fortunes; its state secretary Mohammad Salim is a candidate from Murshidabad which goes to the polls on May 7, in the third phase. With two MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha, the Congress has its work cut out to keep both safe. Low voter turnout could be fateful for both parties.

While voters decide which political parties and their agendas serve their best interests, the lattice of micro-motives that underlie their choices will become clear only after June 4. The challenge for all parties is to ensure that their committed voters turn up at the booth on polling day. With five phases still to come, the BJP and the Trinamool Congress have time to repair their relationship with voters who may prefer to sit out this election, because they are unhappy with their leaders.

If the Trinamool Congress’s committed voters outnumber the BJP’s, the decision will go one way; if it is the reverse, it will go another. Without a wave and the anxiety-inducing low voter turnout, this election could boil down to a single question: which leader, Modi or Mamata, is the lesser evil?

(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)