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‘No to BJP, But Yes to What?’: Why Bengal’s Decisive Mandate Reflects Courage

Upal Chakrabarti

The Bengal mandate is inspiring, and it’s worth asking why. In the recent past, social life in Bengal has not been easy, to say the least. The political forces which determine, to a great extent, livelihood conditions, cultural expressions and aspirations for the future have been on a roller-coaster ride, unsettling the population since 2011, when the 34-year long rule of the Left Front came to an end.

The overwhelming mandate against the Left Front, and in favour of the Trinamool Congress, generated strange expectations. At some level, it seemed to be simply a mandate of freedom, to choose something other than what was given for all levels of life in Bengal, namely, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and its ways of governing public life.

Be it amongst the urban or suburban middle classes or the rural populations, choosing the TMC over the Left Front did not signify the endorsement of any defined model, vision or logic of governance and development. It simply implied reminding oneself that certain kinds of rights, to dissent, to reject, to choose or to be autonomous, could be reclaimed by large populations.

Resistance against the Singur-Nandigram land-grab actions were initiated mainly by a combination of independent initiatives of heterogeneous groups, like students, activists, scientists, teachers, lawyers in the city and highly politicised peasants in the villages. As the discontent swelled, the TMC joined forces with these groups, eventually re-organising this resistance into electoral success against the Left Front.

Welfare schemes and corruption

Consequently, there was a general perception of openness about the upcoming regime: its personnel, policies, strategies and attitudes. Moving beyond the formulaic definitions of ‘left’, ‘right’, and ‘centre’, the 2011 moment in Bengal politics and people’s public lives offered possibilities of redefining these labels, and reimagining political formations typically associated with these classifications. Very soon, however, the moment seemed to be over. Two successive tenures of governance by the TMC put all such prospects, openings, hopes and claims under serious questioning and criticism.

The TMC-led government launched a huge range of welfare schemes for backward communities, and invested heavily in material and institutional infrastructure, but this entire field of ‘development’ also became a gigantic public kitty for corruption at all levels of the party. This became nepotism in the shrinking field of employment, as aspirants for school and college teaching, and administrative jobs in government departments struggled to break the corrupt networks of the party.

Corruption and control were joined with violence and authoritarianism, especially in the context of rural political life, as was experienced in the panchayat elections of 2018. People’s disappointment with the TMC came out clearly in the remarkable performance of the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, where the latter triumphantly emerged as the greatest political opposition in the state by securing 18 out of 42 seats.

Bengal went to polls in 2021 with this background.

BJP’s ‘double-engine’ dream

The BJP, we knew has moved from strength to strength, as its electoral fortunes swelled across the country. In Bengal, it attempted to remodel the political framework and culture, and offered an entirely different political and economic alternative in line with its national policies. From disinvestments of public enterprises, to constitutional amendments like the reading down of Article 370, and the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, to preparation of plans for the corporatisation of education in India in the form of the New Education Policy, to the building of the temple in Ayodhya, BJP projected itself as a new-age political force as against those which resisted any form of change.

Over the last five years, it successfully secured the support of a substantial section of marginalised communities, cutting across caste, class, gender and ethnicity. To top it all, it invested spectacularly in the mediatised representations of its presence, making its face Narendra Modi – an icon of unbridled aspirations, conspicuous consumption and total control.

The pitch of this campaign was unprecedented. Shah and Modi offered a dream to the people of Bengal, what they termed the ‘double-engine’ government, essentially implying the flooding of money into Bengal from two sources, the state and the Centre. The evidence of the power of money was palpable, as people saw great numbers of TMC, and even CPI(M) cadres and leaders turn to the BJP, as organisers, candidates and more. Everything seemed to be destructible, changeable, and saleable: the people saw and felt that money could turn all things to its opposite.

Bengal went to the polls in 2021 with this background as well.

What does rejection of the BJP show?

The huge victory that the TMC secured by bagging 213 seats as against BJP’s 77 seats is significant not only because it means a strong rejection of a possible saffron Hindutva regime and consequent communal polarisations. But voting against the BJP meant taking a position against the perceptions and promises of riches and a better life, for a people who are fighting the miseries of unemployment and living for decades with the perception of being ‘trapped’ in a poor state, neglected by the central government. Voting against the BJP meant refusing the illusions and simulations of grandeur, as circulated in the rags-to-riches stories of an Ambani or a Modi, or in the promises of prosperity offered by Amit Shah as a self-identifying successful bania.

The rejection of the BJP showed that the professional middle classes were not seduced by the promise of full payment of better salaries to lakhs of government employees, who are paid almost half of their national counterparts due to the TMC’s refusal to pay the appropriate dearness allowances.

The decisive mandate in favour of TMC, and against the BJP throws light on a complex, courageous, and critical choice that the people of Bengal made in the 2021 assembly polls. Unlike 2011, here the people of Bengal were given an elaborately packaged and powerfully projected ‘alternative’, and they were, in any case, weighed down by failures of the existing regime. Beyond everything, they were, and still are struggling simply to live amidst a raging pandemic in a state which certainly needs a significant improvement of its medical infrastructure to combat this biological crisis.

Given the availability of an easy binary between suffering and hope, translatable as TMC and BJP, it is indeed thought-provoking that people’s voting choices reflected a more complex self-interpretation of their predicament.

Despite the high-decibel campaign, the TMC recovered votes of Adivasis and Dalits in several regions of Bengal, where they had lost the support of these social groups due to unbridled corruption by the ruling party.

Clearly, by voting for the TMC they did not choose ‘suffering’, nor did they refuse ‘hope’ by rejecting the BJP. In fact, it can be argued that there were people who resorted to this simple binary, quite understandably, and gave the BJP a considerable ground in this election. But those who chose the TMC also embraced certain forms of life. They accepted, despite the shortcomings, a form of governance which has displayed some political will in developing welfarist schemes for backward communities, in providing healthcare for the poor, in expanding its medical capacities during the pandemic, in taking a resolute position against communal polarisation, in speaking against privatisation of government assets, and, above all, in being amidst the people in moments of crisis.

Choosing these forms of governance and development, despite their corruption and lack of a ‘structural’ vision, against the seductions of the ‘better life’, is a difficult and bold choice to make in these dark and hopeless times.

The outsider Bengal perceived in the BJP was a ‘neoliberal-communal’ cocktail, which most of the ordinary people of the place, cutting across diverse ethnic affiliations, refused to drink. That is why lakhs of ‘outsiders’, like Biharis, Oriyas, Marwaris, Punjabis and others, voted against the BJP in areas dominated by ‘non-Bengalis’, even in this election where the leading slogan was “Bangla nijer meyekei chay”. This choice is surprising, inspiring and potent.

The votes against the BJP, and for the TMC, reflected a courageous ethical choice of countless ordinary people, for welfarism and diversity, made in inconsequential local settings, against the predatory national trends of precarious livelihoods and authoritarian political cultures. The future will no longer just be, taken over by the time of capital. The future in Bengal, and in Bengal’s India, might be on its way to become an unknown something, and this moment of critique has started making it.

(Upal Chakrabarti teaches Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. Article courtesy: The Wire.)

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Editorial addition: In an article in Mainstream, “The West Bengal Mandate”, Sumit Chakravartty writes:

Long years ago in the 1940s a well-known Bengali poet, Sukanta Bhattacharya, had written the following lines.

An undertaking

Leave worrying comrade

Sharpen your heart to a point of steel

Let the wicked aggressor come to realise

That the land of Bengal is a fortress-invincible.

Today, Bengal has through the results of these elections once again brought out the abiding significance of these lines.

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Battle for West Bengal: Mamata Lost but TMC Won, Modi-Shah Duo Humiliated, Left-Congress Washed Out

Sunil Mukhopadhyay

An irony it may seem, but it is a fact. The ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee—who successfully steered her party to power in West Bengal for the third time in a row—lost her battle at Nandigram by 1700 votes to her erstwhile lieutenant Shubhendu Adhikari who defected to the saffron party before the elections. The TMC has demanded recounting pointing to manipulations of EVMs and the decision on the complaint is pending. The party won about three fourths of the seats and garnered nearly 50 per cent of the polled votes, the highest ever by the party in this eastern state bordering Bangladesh and defeated its mighty opponent, the BJP which rules India and many states of the country. She has come out as an anti-BJP crusader capable of halting the winning spree of the saffron party.

When Mamata was claiming in election rallies that her party would win over 200 seats, many political observers took it as campaign rhetoric. But the party won as many as 214 seats out of 292 went in polls. Similarly, union home minister Amit Shah’s claim of BJP grabbing 200 plus seats was also not taken seriously either. But they thought that there would be a neck-to-neck contest between the TMC and the BJP, while the Sanjukta Morcha comprising the Left parties, Congress and their newly found ally the Indian Secular Front, playing the third child of a goat would finish as a very distant third.

The saffron party mobilized all its might, money and muscle power to dethrone the lone woman chief minister of an Indian state. The prime minister, union home and other ministers as well as chief ministers of BJP-ruled states along with the BJP president shuttled like daily passengers to this state by chartered planes to ensure their victory. Around 130 TMC MLAs and leaders defected from the party considering it a sinking ship. A union minister and a number of BJP MPs from West Bengal were put into the fray. The BJP ferried huge number of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cadres from other states to support and gear up their election machinery. The eight-phase election helped the party to shift its cadres from one area to the other. All this might have created some illusions among the political observers.

Despite all such efforts the BJP ended up with only 76 seats. However, nobody ever thought that the Sanjukta Morcha will be washed away. All of the Morcha candidates lost (and most of them had to forfeit their deposits), barring one representing the ISF. What a pity! This is for the first time in the post-independent history of the state that there will be no representation of the Left and the Congress in West Bengal Assembly. This will have a long lasting bearing on the state’s political and social life.

Why the much-hyped Modi-Shah duo failed to deliver while Mamata succeeded? First, the duo had put all their efforts to polarize the election on communal and cast lines through social engineering.

They had a clear arithmetic in their mind. The people of the state suffered most because of the partition and around 27 per cent population of the state are Muslims. So, the duo thought that it would be easy to mobilize the Hindu majority by playing the communal card and accusing the TMC of Muslim appeasement. They, in effect, tried to fool the Bengalis. A simple arithmetic shows that playing a Hindu (the majority) card is far more remunerative than playing a minority card. However, the strategy had a limited success. The duo perhaps failed to realize that the people of Bengal were, on the whole, never been diehard communal. The people of both the communities fought together successfully to stall Lord Curzon’s effort in 1906 to divide the erstwhile Bengal on communal lines. Since independence, the state never saw any major communal riots as was witnessed in many other Indian states, including Gujarat, Delhi and UP. Through social engineering they tried to woo scheduled castes (23 per cent of the total population) and scheduled tribes (around 6 per cent). This social engineering has perhaps paid the saffron party some dividend in a number of districts where SCs, the Matuas and STs are strong in numbers. However, in two Muslim dominated districts like Maldah and Murshidabad districts, where the Congress and the Lefts had considerable influence, the Muslim voters shifted their allegiances to the TMC almost en masse in order to defeat the BJP, while a huge chunk of the Hindu votes went to the saffron party.

Second, the BJP as well as the Morcha were harping on some misdeeds like appropriating cut money and mismanaging the Amphan disaster by some local TMC workers did not fetch the desired result. The TMC swept the Amphan-affected South 24 Parganas and the Sunderban areas of the North 24 Parganas districts. Many TMC workers accused of appropriation were embraced by the BJP and were even given tickets to contest in the elections. This gave a wrong signal to the electorate and most of the jersey changers lost. The BJP accused the state government of inapt handling of Covid pandemic. Initially this campaign had some impact on the electorate. But the second and more intense wave of Corona exposed the utter failure of the Modi administration as well as its failure to stop the Kumbha Mela (which had a severe impact on the spread of Corona) had finally turned the electorate against the BJP. The TMC’s success in the Corona affected districts like Kolkata and the adjoining North 24 Parganas, Howrah and Hoogly points to that.

Third, both the BJP and the Morcha failed to recognize many pro-people measures and schemes like Kanyashree and Swastha Sathi undertaken and implemented by the TMC government and their impact on the common men, particularly on the poor, the lower middle class as well as on the women. These programmes along with sincere implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme had also helped draw the rural poor to the TMC’s side considerably. There was an anti-BJP undercurrent, too. Many believe that the BJP promises, but does not deliver, while Didi, as Mamata is popularly known, delivers what she promises.

The present observer found interesting information while talking to a Hindu fruit vendor who sells fruit in a nearby railway station and a supporter of the Left. He said, “I support the Lefts. But they are not going to win this time. The BJP, on the other hand, is about to sell the stations to the outsiders and we will be pushed out of the station and of the business. So, I have to think over.” The message is loud and clear.

Fourth, the TMC government had done well in developing and expanding rural infrastructure like road and irrigation. However, the opposition failed to read its impact on agricultural production and income generation of the rural population. The growth in agriculture, poultry, fish and milk production during the last decade (2010-2919) was considerably higher than the national average.

Fifth, the way the BJP leaders including the prime minister and home minister used abusive words like ‘Oh Didi, Oh Didi’ against Mamata violating all civilized codes of conduct during the entire political campaigning has had very negative impact on the electorate, on the women voters in particular. Majority of the women voters stood by Mamata considering her a victim of male chauvinism. One may wonder, why then she faced defeat at Nandigram? There are complains that the BJP used money power to woo, in other words, to bribe a large chunk of women voters in their favour to defeat Mamata.

Mamata played successfully the Bengal’s Asmita (pride) card to her party’s favour. The BJP brought campaigners and large number of RSS workers from other states. These outsiders neither can speak Bengali, nor understand the language and the sentiment of the people of the state. Local BJP leaders, who were instrumental in the BJP’s success during the 2019 parliamentary elections were either ignored or sidelined by the BJP outsiders. Mamata tried successfully to depict all this as examples of political, linguistic and cultural aggressions against Bengal and the Bengalis.

The Morcha, the Lefts in particular also fumbled and eventually failed to decide on their main enemy. They put unwisely the TMC and the BJP in the same bracket and thus ignored or missed a very important point. The influence of the TMC is limited to West Bengal alone and the party virtually has no significant presence in other parts of the country. The BJP, on the other hand, is in power at the center and in several states. They are desperate to seize power for the first time in this bordering state which had has to bear the burden of partition. The RSS, a hardline Hindutwabadi cadre-based organization, is the driving force behind the party. As is known, the RSS had played a pro-British role and opposed India’s struggle for independence. However, its political wing, the BJP could achieve absolute majority for the first time in the parliament ridding on patriotism of the Indian masses and won 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats. At present, there is no other political party in India that has so many seats in the Lok Sabha and the legislative assemblies taken together and is all set to gain absolute majority in Rajya Sabha as well in very near future. They have influence on all the pillars of our democracy—the army, the administration, the judiciary and the media. They are capable of molding the democratic institutions and are out to rewrite the Indian history and the Constitution. Unfortunately, in Hindu-majority India, the graph of sympathy and support of the majority Hindus towards this party is still heading to the north. It is true for West Bengal too, despite their failure to capture power in the state.

The Lefts also ignored the experience of Europe between the two World Wars. During that period, when fascism was raising its head in Europe, there was a similar debate among the communist and socialist parties in Europe. They had no doubts that Fascism was a serious threat to human civilization. They realized that there was a terrible danger ahead. But there was disagreement over who should be allied with to deal with fascism. One group wanted to fight against fascism by forming alliances with all kinds of communist, socialist and democratic forces. The other was opposed to forming any alliance with the socialists. Their argument was that the socialists were corrupt, faltering. They would join hands with the fascists in any opportune moment. Because of this controversy, the process of forming anti-fascist alliances was not gaining momentum, and the confusions were running high among the workers, peasants, middle classes and the democratic and peace-loving masses. In such a situation, fascist forces seized political and state power in various countries, including in Germany. The opposition was crushed. Communists, socialists or social democrats — no one was spared.

In the assembly elections of West Bengal, too, being ‘caught between the devil and the deep sea’, as told by a Left leader, the Left faltered in deciding the main enemy and eventually had to pay a heavy price. They were washed away. Their hope of regaining some of their support during the elections did not fructify. Although the BJP under the leadership of the Modi-Shah duo faced a humiliating defeat thanks to the wise electorate of the state, they came out as a formidable opposition capable of troubling the new state government and influencing the people in order to pursue their agendas, both political and socio-cultural.

(The author is a former journalist and writer. Article courtesy: Countercurrents.org.)

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Key Economic Lessons Learnt From the West Bengal, Kerala Electoral Results

Deepanshu Mohan

The electoral success of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal and Pinarayi Vijayan’s Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala mark a critical junction in the state of Indian politics today. Not only have both these grassroots leaders, belonging to regional parties, stopped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from coming to power in their respective states, they have also shown a way to offer some key economic policy lessons that are vital towards building a strong political opposition against the BJP – at a national level too.

Compared to Kerala where the BJP couldn’t manage to win a single assembly seat this time, in West Bengal, the party won around 77 seats (taking a lot of its vote share from the Left + opposition parties). In Bengal’s highly polarised election, despite all the national hype, an absurd amount of spending in campaign money, the BJP still couldn’t defeat the incumbent TMC. Mamata’s TMC is likely to have won the state by even a bigger margin than the last assembly election. While in Kerala, for the first time in four decades, an incumbent party has won the state election again.

What does it say about the success of both parties and its leadership?

The answer to this may lie in both states’ political economic performance: in the persistent pursuit of pro-people, welfare measures allowing voters, irrespective of geography (rural-urban), class, caste, ethnicity, gender, to vote in large numbers for incumbent leaders. The hawa (political environment) created by the BJP’s campaign chariot couldn’t pierce through the solid foundations of a state economy built around the principles of deliberative redistribution and a robust social safety net for its most vulnerable.

West Bengal

In West Bengal, data shows how the state’s rural purchasing power (measured through household consumption data) was higher than the national average over the last decade i.e. when TMC was in power, even though, it’s decadal growth rate (at 4.9%) was lower than the national average (at 5.5%). Even though urban consumption patterns didn’t rise in proportion to the national household consumption average, more than 72% of its population and voters reside in rural areas, who now voted for the TMC.

On poverty too, despite low-growth levels, West Bengal did well over last decade, as poverty rate fell to 14% compared to the national average where poverty rate went up to 23%. As Maitreesh Ghatak of London School of Economics explains, “Despite the state’s lack of ‘economic dynamism’, the rate of growth of purchasing power in rural areas of West Bengal has been higher than the national average. This could be partly due to state government’s various transfer programmes such as the Kanyashree or Krishak Bandhu or Yuvashree…”

Success of rural-based welfare programmes allowed women voters to drive Mamata Banerjee’s TMC to electoral success, along with rest of the social groups in economically vulnerable categories (minorities, Dalits, tribal communities). A vote share of more than 50% for TMC against the BJP and other opposition parties otherwise would not be possible, if all these groups didn’t vote together for the incumbent.

On welfare schemes, TMC increased spending during its term over the last decade. State budget 2020-21 announced that persons aged 60 and not covered under any pension scheme belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes shall get a monthly pension of Rs 1,000. The new pension scheme is expected to cover 2.5 million beneficiaries, with an allocation of Rs 3,000 crore.

In 2019, the state also announced the Krishak Bandhu scheme – its own version of the PM-Kisan cash transfer scheme. The state also provides free electricity for the poor. Under the Karma Sathi Prakalpa scheme, the government provides loans of up to Rs 2 lakh for taking up any new income-generating project. With an allocation of Rs 500 crore, this scheme aims to target one lakh unemployed youths.

Kerala

In Kerala too, Pinarayi Vijayan’s electoral success was built around his government’s ‘pro-people’ policies that helped the state battle a pandemic’s wrath. Kerala – which was one of the worst affected states during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, a natural disaster (floods in last August) – made sustained public investments in healthcare, social-protection and immediate disaster response-rehabilitation.

On social and economic performance, Kerala has always done well in comparison to most other states, especially those in the north where the BJP has had a strong electoral foothold. Kerala outdid others in implementation of family planning practices, in health indicators like life expectancy, infant mortality rate, maternal mortality, neo natal care etc. Based on the last census data, the state has the lowest decadal population growth (4.9%), the highest female-male sex population ratio (number of females per 1000 males: 1084) as compared to other Indian states. The state also has one of the highest proportions of GSDP (gross state domestic product) spending on areas of education, health and other social-welfare related expenditures.

What’s interesting to note in the context of both West Bengal and Kerala is how, despite low state-level growth performances (in comparison to the national average), they have done well in improving the lives of those in the economically vulnerable category (those in the minority and of lower class-caste), and over time increased their purchasing power. Better implemented land-reforms, localised schemes of conditional income transfers, and a better functioning price-rationing system for ensuring basic nutritional supplies and making access to housing, healthcare and education more affordable to the general population, including those who migrated to the state from other states. More importantly, those in rural areas realised the actual benefits of these steps.

State governments, whether TMC or LDF, did well to identify and realise the needs and interests of the society, while consciously moving away from projecting the paradoxes of a classical neoliberal policy trap – the adoption of which widened both economic and social inequities in many Indian states including the high growth performing states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, to name a few over the last decade.

We see horrible repercussions of that today when states like Gujarat and Maharashtra’s healthcare system are observed to be severely stressed even after a year of the pandemic. Each of these states under invested in public health, education and in social welfare measures. Poverty, pre-existing social inequities further accentuated from a neoliberal economic policy pursuit for decades, giving way to a ‘false’ politics of aspiration, disconnected from actual realities, coalesced around an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ identity-based polarisation and majoritarian assertion with less regard for people’s welfare.

Building a consensus for a national level political and economic opposition to such politics may therefore draw upon vital lessons from the success of grassroot, welfare politics of Mamata Banerjee and Pinarayi Vijayan. They show how deliberative redistribution anchored in an economic policy system working for and in the interests of the poor and most vulnerable are part of a successful counter punch to BJP’s centralised national politics of authoritarian populism being practiced sans a strong welfarist policy outlook.

(Deepanshu Mohan is an associate professor and director, Centre for New Economics Studies at O.P. Jindal University. Courtesy: The Wire.)

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In another article in the Wire, “Bengal: Key Factors That Led to TMC’s Defeat of the Modi-Shah Behemoth”, Himadri Ghosh writes (extract):

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held 23 rallies in 14 days in Bengal. Union home minister Amit Shah, 79 rallies, roadshows and town halls in 20 days.

The ruling party in the Centre deployed over 52 Union ministers, MPs, chief ministers and cabinet ministers of BJP-ruled states to campaign in Bengal. Around 15 to 17 senior BJP and RSS leaders were stationed in Bengal for more than three months.

BJP engineered large-scale defections from Trinamool Congress (TMC), Left and Congress and portrayed itself as the favourite. A completely one-sided media which manufactured a BJP-wave narrative in Bengal. A host of central agencies intimidated and harassed TMC candidates by summoning them during the election campaign. A non-neutral Election Commission whose design of the election phases gave undue advantage to one particular party.

However, in the end, the mandate was overwhelmingly against the saffron party. An incumbent government of 10 years secured 47.95% votes in its third term. TMC swept the state by winning 213 of the 292 seats in the state. This is TMC’s best performance ever. Bengal assembly has 294 seats, elections are due in two seats as candidates have died after testing positive for COVID-19.

Mamata Banerjee emerged as the woman who brought the Modi-Shah politicking to a grinding halt. How did it happen?

Women votes

In the assembly election, TMC had run an aggressive campaign and women were at the centre of it. The ruling party was aware of the role women vote banks could play in this election, just like in Bihar elections.

According to the Election Commission, the total number of voters in the state was 7.32 crore, among whom 3.73 crore were male, and 3.59 crore female.

TMC’s appeal to the women’s electorate was not just limited to campaigns and speeches. The Banerjee government over the past 10 years has specifically targeted women and girls through its policies.

The most talked-about among them is the Kanyashree scheme launched in 2013, which provides cash handouts to girls between 13 and 18, provided they remain unmarried and in school. The broader aim of the scheme is to prevent child marriage and reduce the school dropout rate among girls. The scheme also won the United Nations Public Service Award at The Hague in 2017.

Another scheme called Rupashree, launched in 2018, provides a one-time financial grant of Rs 25,000 for economically stressed families at the time of their adult daughters’ weddings. This scheme too aims to deter child marriages.

Swasthya Sathi, the health insurance scheme, offers a family health card issued in the name of the household matriarch. “Through her policies, she (Mamata) is breaking the patriarchal structure of our society and bringing women to the forefront,” state health minister Chandrima Bhattacharya had said.

The Wire found that these schemes struck a chord and women were vocal about the benefits. At South 24 Parganas, Kulpi, one Biswanath Das told The Wire, “Men switch their votes, but women won’t. They are firmly with Didi. No government helped women like this government.”

Welfare model

Since 2011, Banerjee’s government has focused on the welfare state model, which also led to allegations of rampant corruption.

Cash handouts were given to girls who continue in school, and a one-time cash transfer of Rs 25,000 for further studies or for getting married. Stipends for Dalit scholars; old-age pensions for women, folk artists were given, along with a cash handout to cover funeral costs. These schemes have been making a difference in the lives of several poor people.

The cash-handout scheme also has an economic impact on society. In a recent piece in Anandabazar Patrika, Maitreesh Ghatak, professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE), explained that in the past decade, the state rural consumption increased owing to various grant schemes of the government (Kanyashree, Krishak Bandhu, Yubashree). Ghatak also said that West Bengal’s success in reducing poverty over the past two decades has been similar, its success is greater than that of the rest of the country, and it is very clear in the last decade.

After the first lockdown was lifted last year, The Wire visited Purulia, one of the most backward districts of the state. Fifty-six-year-old Deben Sahis, who has a family of five, said, “Now we are alive because of the rice given by the state government, without that we would be dead by now.”

Even though Purulia largely voted for BJP, in this election TMC recovered some of its lost ground. In 2019, BJP was leading in all nine assembly segments of the district. But in the just-concluded assembly election, BJP came down to six seats and TMC bagged three seats from the district.

With the ‘Duare Sarkar’ campaign, TMC managed to take the welfare model one step further. A 60-day campaign for the delivery of specific 12 schemes of the state government to the people through outreach camps was organised at the level of gram panchayat and municipal wards. The campaign benefited a huge number of people across the state.