The EVM, black money charges may look facile but TMC is cleverly pitching for another polarised debate

One doesn’t know if election strategist Prashant Kishore’s expertise played a role or not but given Trinanool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee’s first roadshow after the Lok Sabha debacle, doesn’t look like there is a dramatic difference in her fightback. Mamata has always relied on her own brand of rhetoric, confrontationist style and crowd-pleasing punchlines to show she is in command of her game. To her, there was no question of rising again because she still had not fallen. Hence she chose her personal history to relaunch her fighting spirit, one that many observers had seen flagging post her narrow win in the Lok Sabha. Martyrs Day is observed annually by TMC on July 21 to commemorate the killings of 13 people in police firing in 1993, when Mamata, then a Youth Congress leader, had launched a march to the secretariat, demanding that voters’ card be made the only document to allow people to exercise their franchise. She cleverly recalled the legitimacy of a well-worn voting process to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), calling the Lok Sabha results a mystery rather than a history, suggesting manipulation through electronic voting machines (EVMs) and arguing for a paper ballot in local level polls.The EVM trope is old and frankly, the overwhelming Lok Sabha verdict has all but junked that argument. No amount of tampering could have done the damage in Bengal where the TMC’s organisational network is very strong still and could have forced counter-measures. Is this call, therefore, calculated to ensure a return of a process that she can manage better? Or just to hold her party cadres together in the face of a big bad wolf in her unique strategy of fighting the politics of oppression? In this effort, she strategically left out any mention of the communal card and instead focussed on the BJP’s bid to unlawfully usurp the administrative machinery. Hence the mention of EVMs and the charge that the Railways ran fewer trains to prevent her supporters from reaching the venue of the rally.

And then she took the bull by the horns on the “cut money” issue, the extortion drives by unruly TMC cadres, with a counter-accusatory question for the BJP — “Where is the big black money you promised to return?” If she had instructed her cadres to “return” the cut money and is sanitising her hoodlums, it was still paltry compared to the bigger party’s black money retrieval trail. So though there was no major announcement of programmes that one had expected, Mamata just laid a count-counterpoint pitch focussing on the BJP as an enemy of Bengal. There is no doubt that this approach has worked magic in the past and going by the numbers on a Sunday, Didi can still work the ground. But for 2021, she has to look much beyond sloganeering and make some sobering moves.  For starters, she has to live down the minority appeasement card with a more balanced cooption of the majority, something that has been driven purely for political gain. Then she has to arrest the drift in the bureaucracy and police, who are wary after the BJP’s unparalleled verdict in the State and do not want to be seen as blatantly toeing her line. Then there is the larger slide brought about by her purist Bengal line, antagonising non-Bengalis as outsiders and settlers. But knowing her shrewdness, she doesn’t shoot the arrow recklessly. She may just want to foist another divisive agenda ahead of the 2021 polls and gain from polarisation around Bengal’s identity and pride. And finally, with national ambitions out of the way, Didi may just look inward for her own good.