The first post-Independence Hindutva political outfit, Jan Sangh, was forged in Bengal but the state has resolutely kept that historical legacy at bay.

CS Bhattacharjee probes the reasons why India’s third largest state in terms of Lok Sabha seats has never embraced rightwing nationalism

The Bharatiya Janata Party has never been more than a fringe player in West Bengal despite the fact that several Bengali leaders played a crucial role in the evolution of India’s Hindu rightwing. Jan Sangh, BJP’s forerunner, was founded in 1953 by Shyamaprasad Mookerjee, once a member of Nehru’s Cabinet. NC Chatterjee, father of leftist stalwart and former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, was a president of the Hindu Mahasabha. But neither his son nor any Shyamaprasad kin ever flirted with a Hindu outfit. The state as a whole has traditionally perceived the BJP and its progenitors with a degree of suspicion.

As a result, the Shyamaprasad legacy hasn’t impacted politics in the state. Experts cite several factors for the inability of Hindutva forces to secure a firm toehold in Bengal. Says Tarun Mondal, SUCI (Communist) MP: “Bengal’s cultural heritage was shaped by freedom fighters and social reformers, towering personalities like Surjya Sen, Pritilata Waddedar and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. They preached true secularism – not the secularism of today’s politics. No single political party can take credit for the state’s progressive secular left-leaning moorings that have kept communalists at bay.”

Barun Dasgupta, former Guwahati bureau chief of The Hindu, cites another reason: “RSS and Hindu Mahasabha never participated in the freedom movement. So their acceptability among the masses has been limited from the outset.” He adds: “After the communal riots triggered by Muslim League's ‘Direct Action Day’ on August 16, 1946, the stream of refugees from East Pakistan came under the influence of the Left. The weak Hindu rightwing parties, neither the dying Hindu Mahasabha nor the rising Jan Sangh, could garner much support among the displaced. Even a popular leader like Shyamaprasad Mookerjee failed to make his party acceptable in Bengal.”

This state, says Professor Tarun Sanyal, president of the pro-change Forum for Intellectuals, Artists and Authors, has always been culturally pluralistic. “Unlike North India, Bengal never supported Brahminism. In the 15th century, during Hussain Shah’s reign, Bengal produced a religious leader like Mahaprabhu Chaitanya Dev. The 18th and 19th centuries produced Indian renaissance leaders like Raja Rammohun Roy, Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore and others. Their vision engendered two distinct streams — one nationalistic, the other left-revolutionary. Both regarded Bengal as a separate cultural entity. BJP, preacher of Hindi-Hindu-Hindusthan, does not quite fit here,” he adds.

Psephologist and political scientist Biswanath Chakraborty asserts that Bengal’s left-revolutionary culture is a bulwark against BJP. “Bengal’s elite never supported those that were behind the 'Great Calcutta Killings' during Partition. This intellectual class opted either for the Congress or the undivided CPI, different from today’s communists. Bengal was the land of the renaissance in the 18th century and India’s industrial resurgence began in this part during the British period. That is the reason why the concept of both nationhood and class-based politics emerged here first,” he explains.

But that is not to say that Bengal did not send Sangh parivar representatives to the Lok Sabha after Shyamaprasad Mookerjee and NC Chatterjee. Tapan Sikdar and Satyabrata Mukherjee were Union ministers under Atal Behari Vajpayee. One of BJP's founders, Vishnukant Shastri, was a Rajya Sabha member in 1992. In 1977, he won the Bengal Assembly elections on a Janata Party ticket. Haripada Bharati was also an MLA at that time. Jan Sangh was dissolved into Janata Party in 1977 and the two leaders rode the wave unleashed by Jayaprakash Narayan’s anti-Emergency agitation. In this millennium, BJP has won an Assembly seat only on one occasion. Badal Bhattacharya won the Habra seat in the 2001 election with the help of the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

The sudden 1991 spike in support for the BJP, which polled 11 per cent vote, says eminent journalist Debasish Bhattacharjee, should be attributed to inner contradictions in the CPM and the people’s disenchantment with a ‘corrupt’ Congress. “Since then, the BJP’s vote share has hovered around 3.5 per cent but the party has not been able to consolidate its support in any single constituency quite to the extent to actually win a seat. Badal Bhattacharjee became a BJP MLA in 2001 only because TMC helped him.”

Analysing the role of Sangh Parivar-BJP politics in Bengal, Professor Chakraborty says BJP’s ‘core’ ideology of ‘Hindutva’ has never spread here since its inception in the 1980s. “In 1991, BJP’s vote percentage went into double digits owing to several factors, including mass disenchantment with both the Left and the Congress. Data shows that the BJP vote influenced the final result in up to 65 Assembly segments, and in most of the cases Left was the gainer,” he said.

In the early 1990s, BJP strengthened its presence in the border region — from North 24-Parganas down south to Jalpaiguri and Cochbehar in north Bengal. “But, the Babri Masjid demolition pulled its vote share down. Muslims, in search of social security, returned to either the Left or the Congress,” says Chakraborty.

Interestingly, BJP increased its tally from 1 to 2 in late 1999, when Tapan Sikdar got himself re-elected and Satyabrata Mukherjee also won. By that time, a breakaway Congress faction became TMC and formed an electoral alliance with BJP. Says Chakraborty: “Left’s departure from class-based politics, the United Front’s failure to rule the nation, and Tapan Sikdar’s handling of the ‘East Bengal refugees’ issue helped the party.” A section of the state did accept Vajpayee’e liberal attitude as an ‘alternative’ to the Nehru-Gandhi politics and supported the BJP. But the 2002 Gujarat riots halted the BJP’s progress in Bengal, he points out.

BJP leaders too are aware of the situation. One of them says on condition of anonymity: “A reason for our diminishing influence is over-dependence on the Marwari and other non-Bengali communities.” BJP leaders like Paras Datta and Colonel Sabyasachi Bagchi have joined TMC. With a sole active warrior in Sikdar, the party seems doomed to be an also-ran in West Bengal.

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The trouble that began for the Congress in 2009 now threatens to breach the party’s poll prospects in 2014. Krishna Sairam has the larger picture

While the Congress is under pressure in several states, nowhere is the situation as piquant for it as in Andhra Pradesh. In 2009, the state was a major contributor to the party’s Lok Sabha kitty, a walloping 33 out of 42 seats. Now, experts predict, the results would be quite the contrast. The rising unpopularity graph of the Congress has been put down to a cocktail of heavy taxes, soaring fuel prices and deadly political instability stemming from the proposed creation of a separate Telengana state.

If the recent byelection results and various surveys on the functioning of Congress government are anything to go by, there are disturbing signs ahead. Of 18 Assembly seats that went to the bypolls, Congress just about managed to retain two in addition to losing the important Nellore LS seat. In a pointer to what may happen in the foreseeable future, all these seats, barring Tirupati, were represented by Congress MLAs since 2009.

The party’s hard luck story in Andhra, post-YSR Reddy, continues. Dyed-in-the-wool Congress representatives in the constituencies going to the bypolls, one fine day and without any preliminaries, switched their loyalties to YSR Congress, launched by the late chief minister’s son Jaganmohan Reddy. The candidates may have lost the preliminary membership of the Congress but more than made up for it with thumping wins on the YSR Congress tickets. Today, without a shadow of doubt, the YSR Congress has emerged as a strong third force capable of delivering body blows to both the Congress and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP).

And that is precisely what it has done. It secured 46 per cent votes in the bypolls and that in multi-cornered contests. The fledgling legacy of YSR is fast spreading its base among the three prominent political regions in Andhra Pradesh – coastal Andhra, Telangana and Rayalaseema.

What has hit the Congress really hard is the Telengana issue: does the party and state government support the creation of a separate state carved out of Andhra, a long-standing political demand? The issue has virtually split the Congress vote bank with divided regional loyalties. By and large, party leaders in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema favour a united Andhra. In contrast, the people of Telangana are in ferment, their agitation for a separate state growing in magnitude by the day.

The Telengana issue has now become a mill around the party's neck. The party had 'promised’ to sympathetically look into the demands in the run-up to the 2004 and 2009 general elections. In reality, it has done very little. In contrast to the BJP, the Congress remains ideologically opposed to the idea of small states and has since 2004 pursued a meaningless policy of wait and watch. The BJP-led NDA government had presided over the bifurcation of UP and Bihar into Uttarakhand and Jharkhand respectively. If that was not bad enough, under acute local pressure, the Congress committed a grave error in December 2009 by recklessly announcing that the process for the formation of Telangana would be initiated. The announcement started a huge flap in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema.

Political analysts say that the central government succumbed to the pressure exerted by ‘muscled’ coastal leaders, whose interests are intrinsically linked with affluent Hyderabad and the central leadership of the party had no option but to go back on its somewhat tentative announcement. The results are there to see. From 2009 till date, the Congress has lost all elections in Andhra with huge margins. For the same period, the state has been virtually on the boil.

Says S Sudheer Kumar, an IT executive in Hyderabad, "The government has been unable to control agitations, leaving the people to fend for themselves against mobs. Obviously, people are seeking alternatives. Why should I vote for Congress again?’’ Kumar’s view is representative of the public ire.

Economically, too, the state is in a mess. In the last decade, Andhra Pradesh rarely witnessed power cuts in the monsoon season. Now for the first time, an 8-hour power cut in rural areas and 6 in urban, have added to people's frustration. Power holidays for industries are being enforced. There is no new industrial policy. Employment opportunities have fallen drastically and sales tax on fuel products are the highest in the country leading to all-round discontent.

The Telengana-driven political instability has kept investors away; not too long ago, this largest state in south India was a preferred destination for entrepreneurs. Slowly, many corporate offices are moving to Chennai, Bangalore and New Delhi, what with agitations and strike calls vitiating the working atmosphere to a significant degree.

The year 2009 can be considered a landmark for the Congress. "Since the 2009 elections, there have been three chief ministers but until the Telangana issue is settled, there will be no progress in the state. Either way, the government should take a call on the bifurcation and forcefully stand by its decision,’’ says Sethuraman, a Tamil merchant.

Inflation is a bugbear. "In the last three years, prices of essential commodities, including milk, oil and vegetables, have doubled. Why should I vote this government?" questions an indignant T Janaki Rani, a homemaker. Some preliminary poll surveys have given the Congress nine Lok Sabha seats out of 42. The worry is that if this trend continues till 2014, it will make its return in the state and perhaps even the centre, difficult.

The party’s high command is seized of the issue and the people's strong anti-Congress sentiments. Once Andhra paved the way for the formation of UPA government in 2004. But, in 2014, it shows all the signs of becoming a victim of deadly anti-incumbency.

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