Bengal Civic Polls: TMC Wins Big, BJP Loses Further Ground
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2022-03-03 07:06:58
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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
The crushing defeat in the 2019 assembly elections in West Bengal, despite employing the heaviest artillery to storm the TMC bastion, made the BJP lose its way in state politics and it was reduced to a side player. The results of the civic elections across Bengal have confirmed this fact in a comprehensive way. The party won just 63 seats out of a total of 2181 and its vote share was just 13.4%, marginally lower than the Left Front (which, incidentally, is slowly but surely staging a comeback).
TMC won 1870 seats in total with an overwhelming 63% of vote share. It now controls 107 out of the 114 municipalities, with 4 of them throwing up a hung verdict. In 35 municipalities across the state, the opposition failed to win even a single seat. The BJP won 63 seats, the LF 55 and the Congress 59. Independents, surprisingly, won in 119 seats. The hung civic bodies are also likely to go the TMC way. Such is the dominance of the party that it trounced the BJP even in the home turfs of its stalwarts. In the process, the most-prized BJP catch Suvendhu Adhikari saw the Contai municipality slip out of his control after 30 years.
While the TMC chief and state chief minister Mamata Banerjee called the polls "a festival of democracy" and said that the "people have inspired us to work more", some BJP leaders called the elections a "farce". But senior BJP leader and actor Locket Chatterjee called for serious introspection. The party does need to reflect why people even in places where it won in 2019 are going against it.
It is clear that after the defeat in 2019, the BJP has lost the plot completely. By attacking only Mamata Banerjee, it is making the same mistake that Rahul Gandhi is making at the national level by attacking only Narendra Modi. Local politics is not about personalities. It is about the daily problems being faced by the people. In the face of several people-centric schemes of the West Bengal government, the BJP has not come up with an alternate plan of what it will do for the people if elected. That has made it lose trust. Then, the state unit is in shambles and infighting is rampant. The TMC has used this to its advantage to take the wind out of the party's sails in the state.
