As BJP rises in West Bengal, why TMC may have decided to go solo – it doesn’t lose by much

The three-cornered battle for West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats is beginning to take shape with the announcement of candidates by the BJP and the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). While the BJP has named candidates for 20 seats so far, the TMC has announced all 42,ending any hopes of reaching a seat-sharing pact with INDIA bloc ally Congress.

Meanwhile, allies Left Front and Congress are struggling to put up a joint front. The former has already declared 16 names, and publicly expressed exasperation at the Congress failing to move ahead on seat-sharing.

Over the course of the past two decades, West Bengal’s political landscape has changed considerably – first with the rise of the TMC, founded in 1998, which shrank the Left’s influence; and then with the rise of the BJP, squeezing out both the Congress and Left.

The TMC, which came to power in 2011, has won the most Lok Sabha seats in the state since 2009.

In the Assembly too, the TMC has maintained its dominance, winning 211 of 295 seats in 2016 and 215 in 2021. The Congress and Left have been steadily falling, from 44 and 33 seats in 2016, respectively, to none in 2021. The BJP has been the clear beneficiary of this decline, growing from 3 seats in 2016 to 77 in 2021.

In the Lok Sabha, the TMC has managed to stay ahead, but the concerted push by the BJP is showing results. In the Narendra Modi wave election of 2014, for example, when the BJP came to power at the Centre with a huge majority, the TMC won 34 of the 48 seats in Bengal. The Congress won 4 seats at the time, and the Left and BJP 2 each.

But by 2019, the BJP had narrowed the gap and won as many as 18 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, just 4 short of the TMC’s 22. The Congress fell to 2 seats and the Left to none.

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