Bengal's Lakshmi Bhandar

The decisive win of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress was powered by women voters

- Sibaji Pratim Basu

“GIVE us thirty-five seats from Bengal to make 400 paar ki sarkar possible under Modiji.” Thus spake Amit Shah, the mighty Home Minister and the ‘Chanakya’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In meeting after meeting—with the public as well as the party’s karyakartas—he set this very challenging target, perhaps to give supporters a moral boost and also to unnerve the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). To take it further, he also assured the public that if the people of Bengal could do this, the Mamata Banerjee government would crumble and the BJP would form the government in the state within six months.

Later, as the very long-drawn election was progressing through the deadly summer heat, Shah gave the state party leaders some relief, saying in an interview that his expectations from the state were “24-30 seats”. Most of the exit polls sponsored by major television houses also readily toed the line on 1 June, and began to give the public some miraculous numbers. One of them even gave the saffron brigade a fantastic tally: 27! This boosted the morale of the BJP, and the graph of the stock market saw a meteoric rise. But by late afternoon of 4 June it became clear that the decreasing graph of the BJP’s tally was irreversible. Instead of the minimum target of 24 set by Shah, the saffron brigade was getting just 12 seats. Six seats less than what they had bagged in 2019. Clearly, like in the 2021 state elections, Modi, Shah and the national BJP have failed once again to understand the Bengal narrative in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections.

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