“She [Mamata Banerjee] is trying to divide the Hindu vote,” Rahul Sinha complained while talking to Scroll in July. The former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal had taken issue with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee constructing a Jagannath temple in the beach town of Digha. “We have to make sure that the Hindu vote does not split.”
Sinha’s complaint underscored the problem the Hindutva party faced in the state: despite all its efforts to consolidate Hindu voters behind itself, the BJP still trailed Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress by a handsome margin in the 2021 Assembly elections. The Trinamool had secured 48% of all the votes polled in Bengal then, finishing a solid 10 percentage points ahead of the BJP.
The Hindutva party could defeat the Trinamool, Sinha said, only if it ensured that more than 5% of the state’s voters switch their loyalty from Banerjee to itself. These extra votes would have to come from Hindus, he explained, because Muslims don’t vote for the BJP. But there was one other way to win Bengal, according to him.
“Minus joto hobe, amar plus er dorkar kom hobe,” the veteran Hindutva politician noted as he brought up the special intensive revision of the voter rolls. The more...
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