All Fall Down

The march of the saffron party has been relentless in the East. It has moved through the cracks left behind by ageing regional satraps, turning every faultline into a foothold

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya IS A JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND RESEARCHER

KOLKATA’S Netaji Indoor Stadium, which can accommodate about 14,000 spectators, was packed on September 8, 2022. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addressed the grassroots organisers of her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Beaming with confidence, she declared that a new front of regional parties will bring down Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 parliamentary election.

“There is Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Akhilesh [Yadav] in Uttar Pradesh and Hemant [Soren] in Jharkhand. We will all unite and defeat the BJP in 2024. All of us will be on one side and the BJP on the other,” she said. “If all regional parties unite, it’s game over for the BJP.” The crowd roared: “Joy Bangla [Hail Bengal]!”

None missed that she named the chiefs of Janata Dal (United), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), respectively, but not the Congress. The absence was conspicuous and expected. If Modi had declared a mission for ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, a Congress-mukt opposition alliance had been on her agenda since the fall of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-II government in 2014. “We are the real Congress,” she kept saying.

The 2021 election victory had significantly boosted her confidence, as her party achieved a massive mandate by winning 215 or 70 per cent of the state’s 294 Assembly seats—the highest for any party in the state since Independence. She had bettered her 2016 tally by four seats, breaking her previous record. The only time any party in Bengal surpassed the TMC’s seat share was the highly controversial 1972 election after which the Opposition boycotted the Assembly for the next five years. In fact, the TMC’s back-to-back 70 per cent seat share in the 2016 and 2021 elections was one of the highest for a regional party in India.