Dubai: It’s very much like the slog-over of a typical Indian Premier League match. The team that had kept the opponent on a tight leash, suddenly finds itself reaching out for the panic button courtesy some blows by a rival pinch-hitting batsman in the 18th and 19th overs — and the crowd is lapping up every bit of the fireworks!
With Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial hopeful, leading a high-octane campaign in West Bengal and training his guns at West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) juggernaut suddenly seems to have hit a few potholes on what was until recently looking like a silky-smooth thoroughfare.
In the last two phases of polling in Bengal — the final phase is slated for Monday, May 12 — the fate of as many as 23 of the 42 seats will be decided and TMC will have to win at least 20 of these 23 seats to ensure a 30-seat tally — a tall order by all means, given a sudden surge in public interest over a Modi-Mamata slanging match.
According to a section of independent poll observers, the BJP is likely to give a tough fight to TMC in at least nine seats — Krishnagore, Basirhat, Bangaon, Barasat, Srirampore, Asansol, Dum Dum, Hooghly and Kolkata North. Should the saffron brigade go on to win even one of these seats, it will be a huge setback for Mamata, considering that all, except Asansol, are considered to be TMC bastions.
“The kind of enthusiasm and interest that Modi’s election rallies have generated in Bengal is simply unprecedented and we are hopeful of a very good showing,” Rahul Sinha, state BJP president and party candidate from the Kolkata North seat, told Gulf News on Friday.
However, the TMC is not ready to accord much importance to a perceived Modi “wave”. Derek O’Brien, TMC Rajya Sabha member and national spokesperson, told Gulf News: “All these phrases like ‘surge’ and ‘wave’ in Bengal are far from the reality. May 16 is a few days away and you will see his [Modi’s] gas balloon being punctured.”
However, a certain degree of nervousness is indeed palpable in the kind of language that Mamata has used to return the fire — threatening to put Modi behind bars and even calling him a “donkey”!
To make sure her bargaining chip with the ensuing order in New Delhi remains relevant, Mamata desperately needs to win about 30 seats. Given the Left’s decimation in West Bengal, such a tally was indeed plausible. Moreover, BJP’s vote share in the state has typically hovered around a minuscule 5-6 per cent and that script was unlikely to change — until Modi turned the campaign game on its head. He has addressed as many as eight rallies in Bengal — the maximum by any prime ministerial candidate ever. His harping on the anti-incumbency factor, his jibes at TMC’s dalliance with the Sharadha scam accused and his aggressive posturing over the issue of illegal migrants from Bangladesh seem to have found a resonance with a section of voters.
Addressing a rally at Memari in Burdwan district — once a CPM stronghold — a confident Mamata had said: “Trinamool should be looking at a clean sweep of all 42 seats in Bengal.” As Gulf News trailed Mamata on her campaign on a suffocatingly hot and humid afternoon last month, it was quite clear that rural Bengal was firmly behind her. “She has secured our land, our rights as farmers. So long as she is the CM, we have nothing to fear,” 42-year-old Sahadeb Parui, a share-cropper in Memari, about two kilometres off the Kolkata-Durgapur Expressway, had told Gulf News. While rural Bengal found in Mamata a messiah who had guaranteed that there would be no land acquisitions by force, most voters in urban and semi-urban pockets too were not keen on switching allegiance so soon, despite having a “few issues with the way some TMC leaders were behaving”.
But voter sentiment can be as fickle as the weather. We will know on May 16.
