West Bengal verdict: Why Mamata tasted defeat when she put fish on plate?

KOLKATA: Trinamool stoked the fear of Bengal’s identity facing a threat from BJP but found its own identity getting erased. When Mamata Banerjee made much of ‘maachh’, BJP threw both ‘maachh’ and ‘muri’ into the mix. The fear mongering failed miserably for the ruling party. What mattered was the near-empty plate, and not the palate.

Unemployment, lack of industries and rampant corruption could no longer be swept under the carpet. Fifteen years of inertia that had put Bengal in a state of coma finally proved to be Didi’s undoing. Mamata had quite shrewdly framed the contest as a battle for Bengali identity against a hostile central govt. She drew attention to Bengali migrant workers being targeted in other states, BJP’s alleged dictates on non-veg food and the Centre’s apathy in releasing funds.



Trinamool’s slogan — ‘Jato karo hamla, ebar jitbe Bangla’ (however much you attack, this time Bangla will win) — was meant to be a war cry of Bengali resistance. A state trying to repel an assault on its identity. BJP lost no time in joining the battle. When PM Narendra Modi chose to have ‘jhalmuri’ at Jhargram, it was not mere optics.

When he raised the fish debate, the BJP think tank knew exactly what it wanted to achieve. When Bidhannagar BJP candidate Sharadwat Mukhopadhyay walked around with a fish, the party was aiming for a far bigger catch. And that’s what it finally netted on Monday. To BJP’s shrill ‘ghuspaithiya’ (infiltrators) pitch was added the message that the allegation of Bengal’s cultural and culinary identity being under threat was just a ruse, a red herring to divert attention from the state govt’s failures.

Union home minister Amit Shah fortified that assurance by declaring that a son of soil would be the next BJP CM. During the last Lok Sabha polls, Trinamool had already conceded leads in over 60% of the wards across 125 municipal bodies, including its most prestigious bastions in south Kolkata.

BJP saw its chance and went for the kill. The RG Kar tragedy, which swiftly evolved from a law-and-order failure into a broad indictment of what critics described as a culture of impunity within the state administration, decaying infrastructure and the unresolved teachers’ recruitment dispute kept the pot boiling.

Taken together, these factors produced an amount of distrust among the educated middle class that Trinamool had rarely encountered. “The city, like the state, was not making much progress. Basic infrastructure got neglected because of the burden of doles. They said ‘khela hobe’ and now the game is over,” said PhD scholar Aniket Banerjee, who is forced to search for a job outside the state.