New Delhi: As Trinamul Congress supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee seeks to fend off a saffron surge in her state, an effort is underway to split open her core support base — the 27 per cent Muslim vote. Leading the charge is the joint alliance of AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi and Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AJUP). The alliance is targeting Muslim-dominated areas, including Dinajpur, Malda and Murshidabad — one of the main bastions of the TMC — among other Muslim-dominated pockets in the state.
Other outfits vying for Muslim votes are the Indian Secular Front (ISF), the Left and the Congress. This could help the BJP, which has not only unleashed the Central machinery to conduct a “free and fair” election but has also launched a militant nationalistic campaign to consolidate the Hindu vote bank.
What could also add to the BJP’s advantage is Humayun Kabir’s move to build a Babri Mosque at Beldanga in Murshidabad district. Reports from the state indicated: “Trucks carrying bricks and cement arrive almost daily”, and “videos of supporters carrying bricks on their heads are rapidly spreading across social media, transforming the under-construction mosque into a political symbol”. When contacted a West Bengal BJP leader hoped: “Such communal and anti-Hindu activities could trigger a counter-consolidation among Hindus in the BJP’s favour.”
To make matters worse for the TMC, reports indicate that the majority of the 91 lakh voters deleted during the Special Summary Revision (SIR) in the state were Muslim. It was learnt that the highest number of deletions occurred in the Muslim-dominated district of Murshidabad. Reports stated that of the 1,101,145 voters marked under adjudication, 455,137 voters were found ineligible.” Ms Banerjee said that the SIR targeted “Muslims, Matuas, Rajbongshis… among others”. She said that the Election Commission deleted voters as if “picking and removing lice from hair”.
A Kolkata-based public policy research organisation, the Sabar Institute, also reported that “a total of 2,826 names have been deleted from the electoral rolls in Nandigram in the supplementary lists… Of these, 2,700 are Muslims”.
Muslim voters are expected to play a crucial role in deciding the fate of candidates in at least 40-45 of the total 294 seats. The impact of the SIR deletion and Owaisi-Kabir’s alliance could possibly be felt in Malda, Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur, Birbhum, Nadia, Howrah, Cooch Behar, North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas. Incidentally, of the 190 candidates fielded by the Congress, 63 are Muslims, and the TMC, contesting in almost all the seats, has fielded 42 Muslims.
Speaking to this newspaper, a senior TMC leader claimed that “any opportunistic alliance, mainly to aid and abet the BJP, will have no impact”, and said the BJP’s Bihar experiment “might not work in Bengal”. He pointed out that, unlike Bihar, West Bengal’s substantial Muslim population is spread across urban pockets and rural belts. “It is far more dispersed than Bihar”, he said. He added: “This particular spread would make it difficult for the Kabir-Owaisi alliance to cause any major dent in the TMC’s Muslim vote bank”.
The deletion of names from the Matua community on the electoral lists could also hit the BJP hard. In 2021, the Matuas among other refugee communities played a crucial role in helping the BJP secure 77 Assembly seats in the state. The SIR exercise has reportedly left the community seething. “This is not a good sign”, a BJP minority leader pointed out.
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