National Interest

IT IS REMARKABLE how much the hierarchy of news depends on the distance from Delhi. I have spent much of the past eight weeks in Kolkata and already the priorities of the national capital seem very different. The reality of the many Indias was driven home by the way the series of state elections in North­east India and a by-election in West Bengal were dealt with by the local media and the political class.

That there would be very little national interest in the political future of Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland that together contribute only five Lok Sabha seats was only to be expected. Congress, that once had a stranglehold over all the states in the Northeast, has lost interest in the region, with its leadership finding other things to do while democracy was being played out in this corner of India. Moreover, given the relative insularity of the Hindi belt—something the prime minister has tried to break with his 50 or more visits to Assam and the Northeast—the differences between the three states and their specific socio-political profile hardly registered in the conversations on ‘national’ politics.

In Kolkata, a city that was once the hub for the entire Northeast but has yielded that place to Delhi, there was naturally a significant interest in the way Tripura voted. That is mainly because Tripura has, in the seven decades after Independence, been transformed into a Bangla-speaking state thanks to the influx of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh. It is also interesting that right until 2018, the trajectory of Tripura politics followed that of West Bengal. Congress dominated the state until 1977 and, subsequently, it was the CPM that prevailed, virtually unchallenged. In 2018, riding on the back of its national victory four years before, BJP mounted a veritable political blitzkrieg in the small state, stitched a deal with a regional party representing tribal interests and won a comfortable victory over a jaded CPM.

The interest in West Bengal about Tripura centred on three issues. First, BJP’s ability to retain its hold over a state where it had yet to develop an organic leadership. Much of the BJP leadership in the state has arrived in the saffron camp after having cut their teeth in Congress and, to a lesser extent, CPM. This, as Himanta Biswa Sarma (formerly in Congress) and Sarbananda Sonowal (formerly in AGP) have demonstrated in Assam, need not be a disadvantage. Indeed, for a party that represented a small fringe until the mid-1990s (except in the Barak Valley), these high-profile new entrants brought a touch of practical politics and an awareness of power that was lacking in the ‘old’ BJP. In West Bengal, too, where BJP is now the main opposition to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), Suvendu Adhikari— who was with the Trinamool till the beginning of 2021—is also being tested along similar lines. In retaining power, after having changed a chief minister, BJP demonstrated that an imported leadership need not be a liability, as long as the commitment to good governance and rapid economic growth is intact. The West Bengal unit of the party can draw its own lessons from the Tripura verdict.

The second point of interest was the performance of the Trinamool in Tripura and Meghalaya. The party had targeted several small states—earlier its focus was on Goa—and mounted an expensive publicity campaign there to secure enough votes to gain recognition as a national party. It failed miserably in Goa and in Tripura it secured less votes than NOTA. In Meghalaya, where it had used Mukul Sangma to break Congress and emerge as the principal opposition, it secured some 14 per cent of the votes but its tally of seats fell dramatically. With the series of indifferent results outside West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s dream of emerging as a prime ministerial candidate in 2024 has gone up in smoke. She will have to limit her ambitions to Bengal.

To compound Mamata’s woes, she lost a by-election to the Congress-Left alliance. This was no ordinary loss. It happened in a seat where Muslims make up 65 per cent of the electorate. In 2021, the Trinamool had secured more than 90 per cent of the Muslim vote and made itself near-invincible. If the Muslim votes now get divided between TMC and Congress- Left, it could either give BJP a strategic advantage or restore the importance of the Reds.

Either way, it promises to be inter­esting, but quite outside the purview of what is called ‘national’ politics.

Assembly Elections 2023BJPMeghalayaNagalandTMCTripuraWest Bengal