Anger at TMC, trust in Didi: As Bengal campaign ends today, women face a choice and a paradox

Bhabanipur is a small urban constituency in the heart of Kolkata that sent Banerjee to the Assembly in a 2011 bypoll after she ended the Left’s 34-year run in power and then again five years later. In 2021, Bhabanipur again sent the TMC chief to the Assembly in a bypoll after she lost the main battle to her former associate and now Leader of Opposition (LoP) Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram.

Bhabanipur is more than just another constituency. Drive through its streets — past Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s home on Elgin Road, the house where Jyoti Basu lived before he became the CM, the expansive building with a red facade that was the last Congress CM Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s residence, the ancestral home of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerji, the house where filmstar Uttam Kumar lived, or past the famous Kalighat temple where Ma Kali blesses all — it becomes apparent that Bhabanipur is a constituency that has influenced the psyche, and history, of Bengal.

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee interacts with local vegetable vendors in Kolkata on Sunday. (ANI)

Many in the CM’s neighbourhood recall the way “Didi (elder sister)”, as she is popularly referred to by her admirers as well as rivals, would swing into action, wading through waterlogged streets during the rains, or how she sat beside the body of the son of one of the women throughout the night.

However, a few hundred metres away, another group of women point their fingers at the sky and say: “God will decide what happens on May 4.” As they warm up, one of them puts a finger to her lips and whispers, “We want change … and the reasons for it are well known.” Just then, a frail, elderly woman walking up from the other side of the street says quite loudly, “This time she is going (to get voted out).”

The Bengal election is about Mamata, and for both her supporters and opponents, she is the central issue. To understand how this election is playing out, The Indian Express spoke to women in Kolkata and the villages of Canning Purba and Canning Paschim constituencies in the South 24 Parganas, a TMC stronghold, since the “mahila” vote this time is even more crucial for Didi. Mamata’s M (Mahila) plus M (minority) vote bank has seen her through in the past and the minority community seems to be standing solidly behind her this time, too.

Many women admire Mamata because of her never-say-die spirit, and others for “taking care of the poor” through the many welfare schemes she has put in place. A 39-year-old HR professional drinking bharer cha — bhar is a small, unglazed, disposable clay cup — on Russel Street says the TMC chief “represents power” and that she “is holding her own despite all the criticism”.

A woman at the Pyara Bagan slum in Bhabanipur says she will vote for the TMC because “Didi has given us so many facilities (like the Lakshmir Bhandar scheme under which an estimated 2.4 crore women receive Rs 1,500 per month)”. But she admits that a few women, ”maybe one or two in 10”, won’t vote for her like last time. “But this is Didi’s state and she will come back. Sarkar badlega par dheere dheere badlega (the government will change but slowly).”

For women considering change, the reason is that they want more. Four such women at the SSKM government hospital, which is beautifully lit at night, are unhappy with the lack of livelihoods in the state and complain that the government is not doing enough to create jobs. “My daughter has completed her graduation and is not getting a job anywhere,” says one of them.

Women in Canning also echo these sentiments, saying inflation has wiped out the benefits of the Rs 1,500 they receive from the government. They also express concern about how the R G Kar rape and murder case was handled by the government and the issue of women’s safety. But not one woman speaks of the Constitution Amendment Bill linked to delimitation and operationalising women’s reservation in Parliament and state Assemblies, something the TMC voted against. Either the women do not know, or they do not care.

Nobody knows how the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls — and the deletion of 91 lakh names — will actually pan out politically, or who stands to gain from the unprecedented voter turnout of 93.2% in the first phase on April 23.

Dissatisfied voters

There is undoubtedly a dissatisfaction with the TMC, possibly more than was initially talked about. But, and this is the curious part, despite people’s unhappiness with the TMC, there isn’t the same kind of anger evident against Mamata Banerjee personally. People make a distinction between the TMC and its leader. Even as women talk about change, they add a caveat about what Didi has done for them.

The CM seems to stand like a “chattan (rock)” against the deluge that may have otherwise swept the TMC out of power. In Deewar, Shashi Kapoor uttered the iconic dialogue of “Mere paas maa hai (I have mother on my side).” For many Bengalis, it is a case of “Humare paas Didi hai (we have Didi on our side)”.

Despite criticism of the “goondagardi,” “extortion”, and the “corruption of TMC lumpens” who “get things done” and also deliver votes in the districts, the CM still evokes sympathy among sections of people.

Win or lose, Mamata Banerjee is a phenomenon of a kind the country has not seen. Here is a woman who first broke away from the Congress and went on to replace it in West Bengal. Within 13 years of coming into existence, she replaced the Left Front government that had been entrenched in power for 34 years. She has kept an ascendant BJP, up from three seats in 2016 to 77 in 2021, at bay in Bengal so far in five elections, including Assembly and parliamentary polls).

Mamata was under pressure even in 2021 but won convincingly, though many gave the credit to Prashant Kishor’s “magic”. That she does not belong to a political family but has had to claw her way up to power adds to her appeal. She has sub-alternised Bengal politics, with women at the heart of it.

This time, with her back to the wall, she has played the “B” card, invoking Bengali nationalism to push back the BJP and paint it as being synonymous with “Delhi”, whose influence the state has resisted for half a century. At nukkad meetings everywhere, TMC leaders have warned people that if the BJP comes to power, the state will lose its Bengali character, altering its cultural practices, food habits, and ways of worship.

To counter this onslaught, BJP leader Anurag Thakur ate fish in front of the cameras, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah promised that if the BJP came to power, the CM would be someone who was born in Bengal, studied in the state, and spoke Bengali.

Making a bid for CM’s post for the fourth straight time, the feisty Mamata Banerjee is facing the most important battle of her life: tougher, many feel, than the fight she put up to oust the Left in 2011.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide.)