Machhe bhaate Bangali vs Jhaal muri

 

This election in West (Waste?) Bengal has been reduced to Machhe bhaate Bangali vs Jhaal muri, i.e, who’s how native. After Phase I, everyone is crowing about the 93 % voter turnout benefiting him/ her. I took a long walk in the neighbourhood park, cast aside all my feelings and emotions as a lapsed cop and an agnostic voter (I never voted even for a college election till 2014) and thought about what I should do. 

I – as a voter, not as a lapsed cop or a born-again Bengali – have been very angry. 

First, the SIR (Special Intensive Revision). I’m all for cleaning up the electoral rolls but the way it was done was disgusting. What exactly was the almighty hurry? The process should’ve been done over 10 months or so. Instead, it was compressed to four months with the Election Commission of India (ECI) playing constant hide-and-seek, creating havoc and untold misery for a lot of people. 

First, there was a physical enumeration form which was as confusing as it gets. I waited for an online thing. When it didn’t happen, I decided to fill it up physically. It was such a challenge. A stamp size photo had to be put on the form. I rushed to get a photo made for myself and a print for my Mom. When I reached the photo studio, there was a mile long queue there. People were puzzled as to how to map their names to their or their parents’ entries in the earlier SIR of 2002. None of the people in the queue could remember the polling booth where they or their parents had cast their votes after the last SIR which was 23 years back. For me, it was doubly challenging because I voted in 2014 for the first time. My father had passed away before the last SIR in Odisha. My Mom was in no position to recall where she had voted or whether she had voted in Odisha in 2002. 

When I checked for the Odisha locality on the ECI website, all the voter lists were in PDF files and one had to go through each one booth by booth, each booth having hundreds of names. I went through two lists without finding the name. In the third list, I was about to give up when I lit upon my Mom’s name and it was a eureka moment! I’m sure most people in my position gave up. This was ridiculous. Why not have these in machine-readable format? If that was due to paucity of time, it was the ECI’s problem, not the voters’. They should have taken the time and made it machine readable or searchable and then and only then should have inflicted this horror. 

Encouraged by this, I volunteered to help out as many as possible, especially the menial staff working around me. With some, I succeeded, with most I didn’t. 

After all this, suddenly, out of the blue, there was something called “logical discrepancy.” There  was nothing logical about it. More hideously, it was inflicted in a covert fashion without any prior information or notice. This was criminal and the courts should’ve struck it down immediately and directed ECI to explain the logic first, educate and inform the voter beforehand and then undertake SIR. Imagine a migrant labour having to travel thrice from Haryana or Rajasthan because ECI kept inventing rules as they went along. Many of them lost their jobs and livelihood. 

Net, net, everybody is angry with the way the SIR was conducted. And they don’t think of ECI as an independent body in this regard but think of ECI as an extension of the Central government. 

TMC (Trinamool Congress) has done two clever things. Their campaign song, “Je lorche sobar daake, sei jetabe bangla maa ke” (The one who fights for everyone's call, will make Mother Bengal victorious) has an inclusive tone which resonates in West Bengal. It also highlights how Didi is fighting alone against a whole array of Prime Minister, Central Ministers, other Chief Ministers and the might of the Central government misused through ED, CBI and so on. Conversely, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) slogan, “Paltano darker, chai BJP Sarkar” (Need change, want BJP government) sounds flat and a little negative. 

The TMC masterstroke has been “Maachhe bhaate bangali” announcement right at the beginning of the campaigning process. This represented the inseparable bond between Bengalis and their traditional diet, rooted in the riverine landscape of Bengal; it also brought to the fore the Bengali cultural identity vis-à-vis the culture in BJP-ruled states, specifically, FIR and arrests of some people having “dared to” have non-veg on a boat in a river and so on. 

After these two stratagems, BJP was only playing catch-up. However, no amount of photo-op of Central ministers munching meat, candidates campaigning with fish in hand and so on could dispel the miasma of “alien culture” sticking to the party. The photo-op of the PM partaking of jhaal muri was seen through for what it was, just carefully choreographed dramebaazi. 

As the campaign progressed, BJP seemed to be besieged with some kind of death wish. In the last assembly election, BJP was on a very strong wicket – even Didi lost her own seat. One of the main reasons they lost then was that Didi-o-didi catcalling which consolidated the women votes solidly behind her. Again, there has been “Ei didi, kaan khol kar sun lo,” “Ulta latka kar seedha kardenge,” “Ei Bangal ke Police” aur kya kya. 

Then there was the extraordinary order of a nine-day booze ban, without precedent, without justification. If anyone was not riled enough, this has put the final nail in the coffin. 

Finally, these campaigns saw the unlimbering by TMC of a political phenomenon called Sayani Ghosh. She has taken the firmament by storm. She has spoken fiercely, she has sung, she has danced, she has given interviews by the dozen and she has been a crowd-enchanter par excellence. 

With all this, my guesstimate is, Didi is winning by a landslide. Unless there is a miracle. Or, rigging on an industrial scale. Given the unexpected things that happened in Haryana and Maharashtra and the statistically impossible 93 % voter turnout in the first phase, what can one say …