A lot riding on women’s votes, TMC and BJP go all out in Bengal as Sandeshkhali episode plays out

It is a constituency that has made a major contribution to the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) electoral success in West Bengal, most recently in the 2021 Assembly polls, and is also a major focus of the BJP’s electoral push as Prime Minister Narendra Modi aims to return to power for a third straight term.

With the stakes high in the key battleground, the Sandeshkhali incident has opened up an opportunity for the BJP to hit the TMC and Mamata Banerjee where it hurts the most by making a dent in the party’s women support base. In 2021, the two Ms — Muslims and Mahila (women) — helped Trinamool thwart the BJP’s attempt at capturing power in the state. The party can ill afford an erosion in either as it looks to stop the BJP in its tracks and prevent it from repeating the 2019 Lok Sabha performance when it won a record 18 parliamentary seats from the state.

During his recent two-day visit to West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attempted to push the TMC on the back foot over Sandeshkhali, a village in North 24 Parganas district’s Basirhat subdivision, where women have accused former TMC strongman Sheiikh Shahjahan, who was expelled by the ruling party last Thursday after his arrest, and leaders of the party of land grab and sexual abuse. This has produced a groundswell of anger against the TMC in Sandeshkhali even as the ruling party in Bengal alleges that the BJP and the RSS have fabricated an “Adivasis versus minorities fight” in the region to make political gains at the expense of marginalised communities.

Raising the Sandeshkhali episode at a rally in Hooghly district’s Arambagh city on Friday, Modi targeted the TMC and the INDIA bloc of Opposition parties and said, “The entire country is watching the situation in Bengal