New In Shah’s Naxalbari visit, a saffron turn in Bengal

As Amit Shah barnstorms across West Bengal, the symbolism of his main pit-stop at Naxalbari on Tuesday was hard to miss. Fifty years after left-wing extremism broke out in spectacular fashion in this nondescript village in North Bengal, the implications of the BJP president Amit Shah stopping to eat a traditional lunch at an Adivasi home here are enormous. As much as it sounds the death knell to the Left movement, it is also a spring thunderclap to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. The results of the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, where efforts for Muslim vote consolidation failed to thwart the BJP juggernaut, but instead produced a counter polarisation among Hindu voters, have created ripples in faraway Bengal.

Mamata, hailing from the Congress stables, had made the same mistake that the parent party had made. She has aggressively wooed the state’s 27 per cent Muslim population, often showering largesse not available to other sections, in the belief that this votebank would insulate her against a right or left-wing surge. But as UP has shown, all it takes is a majority consolidation to reverse the transient gains from minority appeasement. Shah’s Mission Bengal campaign will seek to take advantage of this dismay against Mamata.

His visit to Naxalbari is also a searing reminder to the CPM on the opposition space that it has ceded to the BJP. The Left is still very much a part of Bengal’s socio-cultural, intellectual, and political spheres, but it has lost the ability to influence electoral politics. The BJP, with its narrative of economic development and minority appeasement contrasts, has clearly upended the Left’s revival strategy. However, Mamata remains a formidable politician and can be expected to pitch the Bengali identity against the “outsiders” Modi and Shah. How they fend this bouncer will determine the outcome of the Trinamool-BJP duel.