Has 'THE' Saffron Wave really subsided..??

The day when I am writing this article, Trinamool Congress has convincingly proved their supremacy and has taken oath as the Government of West Bengal and Mamata Banerjee for the third time becomes the honourable Chief minister of the state. BJP on the other hand is all set to be the new face of opposition and has selected Suvendu Adhikari as their in-House leader. From a very neutral point of view or from the viewpoint of a general voter of West Bengal without zero analytics, one can firmly say, the BJP wave in West Bengal that claimed to get 200 Assembly seats has already gone for a toss and it is all about TMC and their tales of glory. But if we see the entire political demography wearing a pair of psephological glasses the things look a little different than expected.

"Neem ke patte karwe sahi...

kamse kam khoon toh saaf karte hain..."

--- Saadat Hasan Manto

Thus, the note is not to satisfy the political view of any particular section. It is to enlighten a theory which might come true in the days to come.

In every analytics, there are two major sections. First is the data of the past and second is the data of the present and the inference we draw comparing the two keeping in mind the factors that influence the change. In this analysis we will majorly consider the vote shares of Trinamool Congress and BJP and as we can clearly (see in Picture 1) in 2016 All India Trinamool Congress got 44%+ votes whereas Bharatiya Janata Party got merely 10%+ votes. If we consider this as the starting parameter of the analytics and compare with the achievements of both parties in 2021, the results are not just shocking but extremely astonishing (see in Picture 2). In the 2021 Assembly Elections TMC got 47.94% votes which is a mere 3% from their vote share of 2016 whereas BJP got 38%+ votes which is a mammoth hike of 28% compared to 2016 results. If we go into a little detail, compared to 2016 Trinamool Congress got 40 lakh additional votes in 2021 whereas BJP secured an approximate hike of 1.5crore votes in the same timeframe. Considering the total number of polling booths of West Bengal to be 80,000 on average, TMC got an average hike of 5 votes per booth in 2021 while BJP achieved an average hike of 19 votes in every booth. This analysis is done based on the Election Commission of India data, which is very easily available on any public platform.

Thus the above analytics is not only done by me, it is worked out by the top heads sitting in Delhi as well. To me, BJP's narrative of securing 200 seats in West Bengal Assembly Elections was nothing more than creating motivational dialectics. In my view, they knew that even if they fail to form a government in Bengal, they will end up achieving an effective margin in 2021 Elections. Thus, they didn't even project a CM face. They kept on hitting hard on issues like corruption, Covid-19, Amphan and other regional topics and were never cited to be drafting a clear structure of the Party if they come into power post the 2021 Elections. It is because of the fact that maybe they also knew that they were not coming into power.

If we recall the Election results of the five states that were declared on 2nd of May, the outcomes are even more striking (Picture 3). In 2016, BJP won a total of 64 seats from West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry while in 2021 they got 147 seats in total from the aforementioned states, which again shows a hike of 83 seats in total.

Now, many of the political analysts may try to find a political flavour or colour in this note. I will recommend simple mathematics to them before concluding anything silly.

Today we are standing in 2021 and in three years from now, we have our national elections slated, in which we all can gauge that regional parties may formulate a coalition which may or may not be supported by other big national parties. Their basic agenda will be to bring down BJP from the Centre. With the perspective of West Bengal, BJP is now sitting in a chair with 88 MP seats and 77 Assembly seats from a state which used to offer them almost none of those, before 2019. The 40%+ votes they got in 2019 by displaying the National agenda and the 38%+ votes they got displaying the regional agenda in 2021 seems to be in sync and they will come into the 2024 Elections as a much stronger opponent with a much larger claim on the vote share (Picture 4).

Let me end this note with a timeless quote of Aristotle which points out,

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."... 🙏