Gyanesh Kumar and co seem to be fans of Agatha Christie. Their Election Commission might be in an SIR soup, but her grey-celled sleuth would have marvelled at the neat alphabetic order in which they have arranged the current round of polls. Polling in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry are being completed first, Tamil Nadu will be next, and West Bengal last. C’est bien, as Hercule Poirot would have exclaimed.
The alphabetic arrangement makes political sense too. Electoral politics in the latter two states is different from the other three. The contests in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry are between local rulers and their local opposition. Himanta Sarma of the BJP is fighting Gaurav Gogoi’s Congress in Assam; Pinarayi Vijayan of the communist-led front is fending off V.D. Satheesan and others of the Congress-led front in Kerala; and N. Rangaswamy’s AINR Congress’s pact with the BJP is pitted against the V. Vaithilingam-led Congress’s partnership with the DMK in Puducherry. The protagonists and the antagonists are all very local; the issues they deal with and duel over are also verily local.
Not so in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal. M.K. Stalin and Mamata Banerjee have hardly any local rivals of equal stature. Rather, they are dismissing their local challengers as nincompoops with little political worth or electoral mass. Mamata hardly utters the name of Samik Bhattacharya, Suvendu Adhikari or Dilip Ghosh. Stalin mentions Edappadi Palaniswamy, but only to call him a stooge of Narendra Modi.
To both Mamata and Stalin, Modi is the challenger. The issues they are raising are of a larger federal nature, the narrative they are raising is of a grander scale, and the enemy they are taking on is the electoral Goliath of the 21st century India.
Listen to their electoral rhetoric. Stalin launched his campaign on March 31 from Tiruvavur, with a grand-sounding federal call to “protect the rights of the state” from the NDA-AIADMK alliance. Udhayanidhi, chip off the old Dravidian block, followed suit urging voters to choose between Modi and Stalin. Virtually every issue the father-son duo raises is about Modi or the Centre—“Tamil Nadu should be ruled from Fort St George, not from Delhi,” they say.
So they dub Modi’s double engine as ‘dabba engine’, charge him with dividing people over faith, funding friends, and playing favourites with states. Instead of fighting off Palaniswamy or Nainar Nagendran, they are pitting Tamil pride against Hindi raj, Dravidianism against Hindu raj, secularism against sanatanism. If the BJP claims India is growing because of Modi, Stalin is talking of how Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Karnataka are growing despite Modi.
As in the Cauvery delta, so across the Howrah bridge. Making the best of every slip that Modi makes—calling Bankim babu as Bankim da, or Sri Ramakrishna as Swami Ramakrishna—Mamata is claiming to defend Bengali cosmopolitanism against Modi’s exclusivism. Thus, Gyanesh Kumar’s voter list revision, to her, is a Modi regime idea for disenfranchising minorities, an act as perniciously divisive as Lord Curzon’s 1905 partition of Bengal that set the Hooghly on fire.
If language pride is the basis of Stalin’s cultural identity war, it is cuisine pride for Mamata. She is pitting the Bengali’s fondness for fish against the BJP’s overtly manifested Vaishnav-sanctified vegetarianism. The gist of her messaging is simple—Modi and his BJP are everything that Bengal and Bengali are not.
The BJP’s question is: wouldn’t the waters that breed shoals of fish also let the lotus bloom?