West Bengal: How India’s only female state leader is under threat from the Modi election machine

In India’s first state polls since the start of bruising nationwide farmer protests, a loss for Mamata Banerjee would leave the country without a single female chief minister, as Mayank Aggarwal reports

Chief minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee in a wheelchair along with other party leaders in a political rally in Kolkata a couple of days after an alleged attack on her (AP)

She is one of the most powerful women in India – so when Mamata Banerjee announced that she had been attacked by a group of men, breaking a bone in her leg on the campaign trail, it sent shockwaves across India.

The only place where the attack was dismissed was in West Bengal itself, where Banerjee is standing for re-election as chief minister in a crucial state poll that began on Saturday. There, the local leader of the Hindu nationalist BJP joked that Banerjee should wear Bermuda shorts to show off her injured leg since “people don’t want to see her face”.

West Bengal is one of five states and territories going to the polls in the coming weeks, but it is seen as particularly important for the advancement of women’s representation in Indian politics, in a country where men dominate the levers of power and where such sexist comments are standard campaign fare.

Since India’s independence in 1947, only 16 women have become state leaders, and if Banerjee loses it will be the first time in 30 years that India will not have a single female chief minister in charge of any of its 28 states.

The elections in West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh to the east of India, begin on Saturday. Such is the scale of the operation – the state has a population well over 90 million – the voting will be split across eight phases ending on 29 April, before results are declared on 2 May.

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It is a three-way fight between Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress, prime minister Narendra Modi’s BJP and an alliance of left-wing parties including the Indian National Congress, the party of Gandhi and Nehru that is now in a sorry state of decline nationally.

Banerjee left the Congress party in the late 1990s after which she came to West Bengal and established Trinamool before waging a long fight to dethrone the left-wing parties that ruled the state uninterrupted for 34 years. She won the 2011 state elections with 185 of the total 294 seats in the West Bengal legislative assembly. Five years later, in 2016, she improved her party’s tally and took it to 211 of the 294 seats.

The road to retain power for Banerjee, popularly called Mamata di (sister) even by some of her opponents, is not going to be easy as the BJP has pressed into service its formidable election machinery, with star campaigners from prime minister Narendra Modi and other top ministers right down to government-supporting film stars descending upon the state. With the exception of a few of Modi’s ministers, a large majority are men.

“All the men have gathered to defeat just one woman who alone has shown the courage to stand up against them. But Mamata di is no stranger to struggles,” says Pratima Mondal, who is representing Trinamool in parliament for the second consecutive term.

She says that while the BJP is promising many things including reservation of places for women in education and jobs, the party that rules nationally should be asked why they have failed to do so in the Delhi parliament. A bill to reserve 33 per cent of seats in India’s parliament and state legislative assemblies has been promised but left in limbo for years.

Of the 73.2 million voters in West Bengal, an estimated 49 per cent are women. Banerjee has nominated 50 women candidates to fight the elections from her party.

“What is commendable about Mamata di is that she has always supported women candidates in elections – it is reflected in the women candidates she has nominated, whether for panchayat (village), state or parliament elections,” says Mondal, who is also a member of the national parliament’s consultative committee for the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

Manisha Priyam, a Delhi-based political analyst, says Banerjee has supported and promoted women leaders throughout her party – something “no other party or leader can claim”.

“In India, women chief ministers are a rarity, not the norm. Even among the women chief ministers that India has had, Mamata Banerjee is the only one who has shown political acumen in building a party from scratch.

“She stood up as the daughter of the soil, while the usual norm was about the sons of the soil in Indian politics. That she was able to do all that in 2011 was an exception, and the improved tally in the 2016 election shows her charisma,” says Priyam.

The significance of the West Bengal election goes beyond Banerjee’s importance for female representation, however. As one of the most outspoken critics of the Modi government, her success or failure will be crucial for the future of Indian politics as a whole, says Priyam.

“She speaks against the BJP and PM Modi in a fierce language that no other chief minister uses. If she wins she will become the fulcrum of the opposition parties, but if she loses then there will be no strong opposition voice left against the BJP in the country,” she says.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a political analyst and Modi’s biographer, drew parallels between the 2021 West Bengal elections and the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state.

“The 2017 UP elections had come a few months after demonetisation” when there was deep unease after the Modi government withdrew the two most widely used banknotes overnight, “but an emphatic win [in UP] neutralised any opposition to the BJP and Narendra Modi.

“The 2021 West Bengal [vote] is as crucial as those elections because of the opposition [the BJP] has been facing recently. If the BJP wins West Bengal elections, it is going to establish a one nation, one party phenomenon and the centrality of identity politics,” he tells The Independent.

“But if Mamata wins it will energise the opposition in other states – especially in Uttar Pradesh for the assembly elections in 2022.”

The troubles Mukhopadhyay refers to include the farmer protests which, since they began in November, have seen thousands of agricultural workers from across northern India camped out on the outskirts of Delhi.

Under such pressure, the BJP has been polling behind Trinamool, on 112 to Banerjee’s 148 predicted seats in the latest poll released earlier this week. Still, it’s a close race, and the BJP is still seen as gaining huge ground on its three seats in 2016.

Banerjee, by contrast, has championed farmers’ land rights throughout her tenure, even at times at the expense of the kind of infrastructure development that other chief ministers use to boost their economies and make a case for themselves to hold higher office.

Highlighting Banerjee’s relationship with farmers, Mondal says that she “fought for the farmers of Singur whose land was taken away for industrial projects … she understands the reasons behind the present protests of farmers as well”.

Those who oppose the Modi government are hoping to utilise the farmer unrest to fuel a decisive defeat for the BJP in West Bengal that would send a message out across the nation, and some farm leaders have already travelled to the state to urge people not to vote BJP.

If it works, Mondal says, it could be the start of something much bigger. “The West Bengal elections will show [the country] how to remove the BJP from the central government in India’s national elections in 2024,” she says.