West Bengal: Corruption charges dog TMC, exodus hits BJP stables

After the euphoria over its landslide victory in 2021, West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress was dogged by arrest of its leaders on corruption charges and failure to expand nationally this year but the party remained the dominant political force in the state.

On the other hand, exodus and electoral setbacks have been the BJP’s fate in 2022, as the state leadership tried hard to keep its house in order to try cash on allegations against the Mamata Banerjee government.

The TMC hopes to maintain its political dominance in the next year's Panchayat polls and play a key role in knitting a formidable opposition ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The saffron camp too has pinned hopes on the rural polls to make a turnaround and mobilize its cadre base to keep its flock together.

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It has been a rewarding year electorally for the TMC as it continued to register massive victories in by-elections to the Asansol Lok Sabha seat and Ballygunge Assembly seat and municipal elections by winning 106 of the 108 civic bodies that went to polls in February.

The erstwhile mighty CPI(M)-led Left Front, which has been in political oblivion for the last few years after losing its main opposition status to the saffron camp, has shown green shoots of recovery in by-elections and civic polls.

"Both internally and externally, it has been a challenging year for the party. There has been friction between the old guards and the new generation leaders at the beginning of this year. Externally, so many of our senior leaders are behind bars. Our image was badly hit. But we have overcome the challenges," senior TMC MP Sougata Roy told PTI.

The emergence of national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, the Lok Sabha MP from Diamond harbour and a nephew of party boss Mamata Banerjee, as the unofficial No. 2 in the party has not gone down well with some senior leaders.

TMC veteran Kalyan Banerjee openly criticised Abhishek for suggestions he made on tackling Covid-19 and retirement age for senior partymen. The issue came to the fore after separate lists of candidates for the civic polls were released, one on the party website and another by party veterans who had the TMC Supremo's approval.

Sensing the drift, Mamata Banerjee, who had founded TMC in 1998, after being re-elected as its chief in February, dissolved the party's national office bearers' committee, which included Abhishek, and formed a 20-member working committee packed with party veterans.

She later formed a new office bearers' team mostly with old-timers loyal to her but reappointed Abhishek as the TMC's national general secretary. The CBI and ED probes into School Service Commission (SSC) scam, cattle smuggling and coal pilferage cases kept the TMC leadership busy with battles being fought both inside courtrooms and also on the streets.

The party received a jolt in July when its secretary-general and industry minister Partha Chatterjee was arrested by ED for his alleged involvement in the SSC scam after the recovery of huge cash from the residence of one of his close aides.

Another party MLA and former SSC chairman Manik Bhattacharya too was also arrested in this connection. After suspending Chatterjee from the party and sacking him as minister, the TMC changed portfolios of nearly half the members of the ministerial council and inducted several new faces, including Babul Supriyo, who came in from the BJP last year.

The party received another jolt when its Birbhum district president Anubarata Mondal was arrested by the CBI in the cattle smuggling case. However, unlike in Chatterjee's case, the party stood by Mondal and dubbed his arrest as a conspiracy.

The party faced criticism from various quarters after the Bogtui massacre in the Birbhum district in March, in which eight people were charred to death due to infighting in the local unit of the ruling party.

The TMC's push to expand nationally and act as the glue of an opposition alliance against the BJP came to a grinding halt after its flop show in Goa assembly polls, preceded by the civic election debacle in Tripura late last year.

The party's decision to abstain from voting in the Vice-presidential polls surprised many, as Jagdeep Dhankhar, with whom the TMC had a tumultuous relationship, won the election as expected. "In 2023, We hope to make a clean sweep in the rural polls and emerge as the party which will play a key role in the opposition front for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls," Sougata Roy of TMC said.

The BJP has, of late, been making fresh attempts to challenge the TMC by hitting the streets, but the success rate has been nominal. The party, which had been struggling to keep its flock together since the assembly poll debacle, with top leaders and legislators, including Supriyo, Arjun Singh and Mukul Roy, switching over to the TMC, faced internal rebellion as several leaders engaged in a verbal duel over an organisational revamp carried out this year.

Besides, it has also been witnessing a slide in vote share in all elections. In the Asansol Lok Sabha by-poll, the BJP lost by three lakh votes, with the Left Front gaining at its cost. "We have come out of the shell the party went into after the 2021 defeat. We hope to make a turnaround in the rural polls followed by the Lok Sabha polls in 2024," BJP spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya told PTI.

The CPI (M), which witnessed a change of guard after a decade with party veteran Mohammed Salim taking over as the state secretary, has shown nascent signs of recovery as it emerged as the first runner-up in the Ballygunge assembly bypoll by replacing the BJP and increased its vote share in all the elections held since the last assembly polls. In a significant development, it has also been winning cooperative elections.

Political analyst Biswanath Chakraborty, "The allegations of corruption have dented TMC's image; it has to work on it."

For the BJP, the challenge would be "to keep its flock together and put up a commendable performance in the rural polls," he said.