New Delhi: With the sixth and final phase of Assembly polls in West Bengal coming to an end today, both Mamata Banerjee, the reigning Chief Minister, and the ‘unofficial’ Congress-left alliance are making claims of getting the overwhelming support of the electorate.
Since West Bengal electorate is politically very aware, the state has the tradition of witnessing high voter turnouts during Assembly elections. In the present elections, the voter turn-out is once again very impressive.
People of west Bengal came out of their homes in large numbers to exercise their franchise in all six phases of Assembly elections. In the two parts of first phase elections, the voter turnout was 84.22% and over 83% respectively. In the second phase, 79.70% people exercised their right to vote. In the third phase, the voter turnout was 79.22% while in the fourth phase, the voting percentage was 78.05%. In the fifth phase, 78.25% of voters exercised their franchise while the sixth and final phase once again witnessed around 84.24% of polling.
What does the higher voter turnout mean for the two main contenders – Mamata Banerjee- led All India Trinamool Congress(AITMC) and the Congress-left alliance?
Read Also: Can the 'unofficial' CPI (M)-Congress alliance dethrone Mamata Banerjee?
As the political pundits point out, a large voter turnout in an Assembly election should cause some worry to the ruling party because the massive turnout, generally, is seen as the manifestation of dissatisfaction among the electorate. However, it is not true in all the cases. In many cases, it has also proved to be massive endorsement of the party and leader in power.
When the polls were announced, everybody agreed that Mamata Banerjee had a definite edge in these Assembly elections primarily because the opposition was badly divided. Congress and CPI(M)-led left front had their committed vote banks but they were not large enough to dethrone Mamata Banerjee. The two parties realised it very soon that if they did not join hands, there was a real risk of handing an easy victory to Mamata Banerjee on platter. It was the need of the hour and a question of their political survival.
The two parties, after much deliberation, finally decided to join hands together albeit ‘unofficially’. What it meant was that there was no official declaration of any alliance between the two parties given the fact that the two parties were in direct contest against each other in another state i.e. Kerala. However, they made it sure that the two parties fielded a single candidate against TMC in as many constituencies as possible.
Under the ‘unofficial’ seat sharing formula, the CPI(M) put up candidates in 200 seats while the Congress party fielded candidates in 80 seats. The two parties agreed for friendly contests in remaining 14 seats where consensus eluded them.
This ‘unofficial’ alliance has reportedly changed the game altogether in these elections. If the media reports emanating from West Bengal are to be believed, this alliance has succeeded in bringing a majority of anti-Mamata forces under one umbrella. And it has caused problems for BJP as well which had garnered an impressive 17% votes in 2014 general elections riding on Modi wave blowing across the country.
Since BJP has no credible face at the state level and the voters knew that the party has no chance of forming the government in the state, a majority of those who voted for the saffron party in 2014 Lok Sabha elections are believed to have shifted their allegiance to Congress-left alliance.
Interestingly, a close look at the vote percentage of 2014 Lok Sabha elections reveals that the TMC secured 39.3% votes while the CPM-led Left Front received around 30 % votes. The Congress, on the other hand, managed to get around 10% of the votes. The combined vote percentage of the Congress and the Left Front is almost the same and If those who voted for BJP put their weight behind the alliance this time, then Mamata Banerjee would be facing a real tough time in these elections.
Mamata Banerjee was well aware of the danger posed by this alliance and that’s why she made it a point to target the Congress and left front for their ‘unholy’, ‘unethical’ and ‘immoral’ alliance. She did not forget to remind the Congress cadres of how brutally they were treated by the Left Front government during its 34 years of rule.
Coming to the two-month long campaigning, all the three important formations pushed their top leadership in the election campaign.
For Congress, both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi campaigned for the party candidates. For CPI(M), Sitaram Yechury and Mohammad Salim left no stone unturned in convincing the voters about the need to overthrow a ‘dictatorial’ Mamata regime.
For BJP, PM Modi himself hit the battleground and addressed rallies in the state in sultry weather. In addition to PM Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and BJP President Amit Shah also campaigned for the party candidates. Obviously, all these parties had an impressive line-up of central and state leaders to campaign.
As far as Trinamool Congress(TMC) was concerned, it had only one leader to bank upon and it was none other than the Chief Minister herself. Mamata Banerjee addressed around 200 rallies on her own across the state without being deterred by an adversarial weather. She was truly the one-woman Army for the TMC.
Mamata Banerjee addressed the last election rally in Dinhata before the campaigning for the sixth and final phase came to an end. In this rally, she claimed that the voters had already voted her party to power once again in the first five phases.
“Today is the last day of the campaign and I know that these elections have been really long and lives of common people have been affected. But at the end of this, we will come out victorious. We have already won. It’s just a question of how great a margin,” a confident Mamata Banerjee said.
As political commentators pointed out, she made these claims on expected lines and, in fact, even the alliance leaders were saying the same thing but both these contenders know that nothing can be predicted in such a fiercely fought electoral battle.
After the completion of six-phase polling , all one can say at this moment is that Mamata had started as a clear favourite but the support that the ‘unofficial’ alliance seems to have got has left every possibility wide open. It won’t be wrong to say that on May 19, the results could go either way.
