The INDIA bloc seems dead and buried in West Bengal with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) declaring candidates for all 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state. At the outset, chief minister and TMC leader Mamata Banerjee has taken a big gamble to go alone in the general elections, where her party’s primary opponent is the BJP. In less than a decade, the BJP has replaced the CPM as the main opposition party and has been registering spectacular gains. In the 2019 elections, it won 18 seats with over 40% votes, just three per cent less than the votes polled by the TMC, which won 22 seats. An alliance with the Left Front and the Congress could have given some cushion to the TMC, especially in north Bengal.
The fact is that while top leaderships of the TMC, Congress and CPM may agree on forging a united front against the BJP, the local reality is different. The violent struggle for political dominance at the grassroots makes it difficult for national leadership to dictate electoral alliances. The Congress high command was invested in seat sharing among INDIA partners, but its local chief, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, saw the TMC only as a rival. The TMC, which had emerged from the Congress, saw its parent party as a rival for minority votes and even grudged the latter’s limited clout in north Bengal. Both the CPM and the Congress have positioned themselves as Opposition parties and trained their guns on the TMC. INDIA bloc’s talk on Opposition unity never translated into action on the ground.
There is another way to look at the fragmenting of the INDIA bloc. The TMC, as the primary political pole in the state, may prefer a divided Opposition than a consolidation of anti-TMC sentiment around the BJP. But with West Bengal rapidly becoming a bipolar polity, the calculations of the TMC, weighed down by anti-incumbency, corruption scandals and incidents such as Sandeshkhali, may go wrong.
