Trinamool Congress’s New Rajya Sabha Nominees Are Useful For 2024 Polls

Be it Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha elections, political parties participate in them to add to their number and traction within the two Houses and beyond it. The choices of nominees of BJP and Trinamool Congress in the recent Rajya Sabha elections indicate that both the outfits of divergent ideologies have in their sights prospective vote banks for 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Of three newcomers to root for the causes of Trinamool Congress and Bengal in the Rajya Sabha, two are party   activists and third had little to do with politics till his name was announced as a party nominee. While Prakash ChikBaraik and Saket Gokhale have been associated with the TMC, it is a first stint in politics for SamirulIslam.

Yet it is Islam who will be deployed as a major vote catcher in 2024 elections. He has been named for Rajya Sabha after post poll analysis of panchayat election results revealed that it’s minority vote bank is no longer committed fully to the TMC cause.

Incidents of violence in which the minority community has been at the receiving end together with the rise of Indian Secular Front has seen to a marked fragmentation of Muslim votes. The victims of a carnage at Bogtui in Birbhum, one of the strongest support bases of the state’s ruling dispensation have turned out to be a reason of a section of the Muslim community cold shouldering TMC nominees in some of the rural polls.

The perpetrators of the crime at Bogftui are alleged to have links with the state’s ruling party Things came to a head when one of the relations of the deceased contested as a BJP nominee in the recently concluded rural polls.

The tip of the iceberg of Muslim voters’ disenchantment with TMC almost came to the fore in 2021 Assembly elections. Yet the elections came up with a triumphant outcome for TMC even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister, Amit Shah extensively campaigning for BJP was offset by wheel chair bound Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee criss crossing the state on a gammy leg.

For the first time in post-independence West Bengal, there were no Congress and Left legislators representing their respective outfits in the Assembly. But if Congress and Left were wiped out in an electoral battle in which the TMC and BJP were the principal protagonists, ISF nominee Naushad Siddiqui pulled off a victory from Bhangar Assembly constituency. Till now, he is the only non-BJP opposition candidate in the Bengal assembly.

If Siddiqui’s has not been a sterling performance as a Opposition MLA, his run ins with the state administration has kept him in the limelight. His stature rose among his followers after the ISF legislator spent weeks in judicial custody following central Kolkata traffic going haywire after a demonstration by ISF supporters.

Things have not looked up for Trinamool with an alliance cobbled out between the ISF and Left Front. Bringing in Samirul Islam in the Rajya Sabha, the Trinamool leadership seeks to break Siddiqui’s connect with the disgruntled Muslim votebank and reclaim it..

Islam has floated “BanglarSanskriti Mancha” The Forum for the Culture of Bengal. An IITian who teaches chemistry in a city college, his tireless work among minorities, migrant workers and other poor sections of the populace during the pandemic have helped him grow roots among the masses though he was not connected to any political outfit then.

But it was not his social work but his political stand in tune with the Trinamool ideology when the chemistry teacher’s forum involved itself against NRC and CAA and advocated communal harmony which endeared him to the ruling dispensation.  His organisation’s participation in a campaign of “No vote to BJP” which caught on in the social media before 2021 elections, seems to have paved his way to the RS nomination.

If Islam is sought to be projected as ai progressive Muslim face against Siddiqui, the former will have no cakewalk before him in next year’s Lok Sabha election campaign. For apart from Bhangar in South 24 Parganas from where the ISF candidate has been elected, the influence of this newly formed party in other parts of the state is feeble as indicated by the panchayat poll results.

About 27 per cent populace of the state are Muslims spread over South and North 24 Parganas, parts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Murshidabad and Malda. While ISF aided by Left has made its presence felt sporadically in the rural polls, Islam’s good work has also benefitted many people of these areas.

Come Lok Sabha polls, it will be a toss up between the spheres of influence of a debutant MLA and an academic cum social worker who is taking baby steps in politics. It would also be a show of strength between the Left and the TMC supporting each of the duo.

While Prakash ChikBaraik of TMC and Ananta Maharaj of BJP have been nominated by two different parties, they share a commonality. Both of them belong to the Rajbanshi community.

It is this common link which led to their nomination in the Rajya Sabha. And it is this shared background which will see them asking for votes from their community members in almost half of the 54 Assembly segments of north Bengal where Rajbanshi support is a deciding factor.

Apart from being a Rajbanshi, Baraik is from a tea garden area and his nomination is being looked upon as a move to placate separatists seeking to carve out a separate state. Incidentally, it is a demand which Ananta Maharaj has championed long before he was named a BJP nominee for Rajya Sabha while the TMC state government lambastedit immediately.

If the BJP nominee, once courted by the TMC dispensation has not voiced the separate state demand of late, he has showed no signs of backtracking from it. Thus the ruling dispensation of the state and its principal Opposition party have chosen candidates for the RS who can be vocal spokesman of their respective parties to influence voters before 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Baraik will be reinforcing TMC’s efforts to recover lost ground in north Bengal which it had lost as Rajbanshis, Kochs and of course Gorkhas had voted earlier for BJP which tacitly supported their demand for a separate state. Ananta Maharaj, on the other hand, while campaigning for the saffron camp next year will subtly underscore to the aspirants of a separate state that with one of their kin on board in the ruling party at  the  centre, the fruition of their demand is not far off.(IPA Service)