In this West Bengal election, as the pitch is raised high and higher, Mamata Banerjee paints herself ranged against an array of collusive outsiders — the formidable machinery of the BJP-led Centre plus an Election Commission it appears to bend and control; the EC’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that has sparked fears of large-scale disenfranchisement plus security forces brought on an unprecedented scale to oversee the Bengal election.The BJP-controlled System in Delhi vs “Didi” in Bengal: There is truth in that framing, certainly. The SIR deletions, in particular—about 91 lakh voters in all—have raised fears of targeted exclusion.AdvertisementBut on the ground, listen to the voters, and you can also hear the sounds of a different election: Here, Didi isn’t a victim, she is the System.She, the uprooter of the Left, is the provider of cash transfers and welfare schemes. This second contest may be playing out not so much as Didi vs SIR/EC/BJP. It is, more, Didi vs Didi.Of course, listening to the voters is easier said than done in Bengal. Their record 92 per cent-plus surge in the first phase may tell powerful stories on May 4 when the votes are counted, but for now, these are wrapped in silences. Most voters are reluctant to talk, many are fearful. Much more than in other elections and in other states, the task of the travelling reporter is to join the dots by filling in the blanks and interpreting the unspoken.After 15 years, party blurs all lines on the ground AdvertisementEven though there are differences between the “party-society” presided over by the Left for 34 years and by the TMC for 15—the former was more ideological in character and the latter is more political-entrepreneurial in its structures—they share common features that explain why the voter is not so forthcoming: Politicisation spreads wide and runs deep in Bengal, blurring the lines between party and institution and government, spilling from public to private spaces, mobilising and also stifling political mobilisation and its possibilities.For a glimpse of these dissolving lines in TMC rule, and to get a sense of the backdrop in which Didi vs Didi plays out, come to village Hakola in district Howrah and its “club”.Sheikh Monirul, who is supervising workers embroidering cloth that will be stitched in Kolkata and then sold, says that anyone who has a “darkar (need)”, or a “jhamela (dispute)”, goes for the “samadhan (resolution)”, not to the thana, but to the local club.The local club is, typically, a place for addabazi (idle banter), with a carrom table and sports equipment thrown in. But it is, primarily, the place where the ruling party meets the people, and plays an often inescapable mediating role. “If we take a dispute to the thana, the (TMC) MLA tells us to come back and go first to the club”, says Monirul.A small distance away, the Hakola Tarun Sporting Club, a one-room shed, has dropped all pretence of being an apolitical community centre. The carrom table and sports equipment have been stacked out of sight, the walls are plastered with TMC posters, and on a table, with piles of voter slips in front of her, sits Aleya Khatoon, the BLO, a crucial cog in the state electoral machine. “Here, in the first list, 61 voters were unlisted, then 182 were put under adjudication, 56 have been deleted.” Her own name was under adjudication and then cleared, she says.In the Muslim para (locality) of Hakola, there are hardly any voices to be heard against Didi and the SIR exclusions may only have consolidated the minority community support for her. But Hakola’s club embodies the deep-rootedness of TMC dominance that is now, after 15 years of Mamata rule, sparking voter resistance, and which is joining with other signs of anti-incumbency.In village Bhaluka, in North 24 Parganas, Moina Pramanik and Babita Pramanik, homemakers, say that Didi is benevolent, and then they list their discontents.Moina talks about a ubiquitous fear: “If we speak out, our house will be identified, they will ensure we don’t get benefits”. Babita says, “I have always supported Didi, even now I am not angry with her… It is her chelas (supporters), who are the problem. They wouldn’t let my son set up a (hair cutting) saloon… Nothing reaches us, even if Didi sends. And now, she only looks after the Muslim…”. No one party should have monopoly over power for long, says Babita. When Didi came, she was different, “she fought for the people”.The sprawling network that is seen to intrude and extort, and control and dominate — from the local club to the neighbourhood mastaan or strongman, from the chela (supporter) to the “syndicate” that is said to enrich itself and funnel “cut money” to the party — is part of the anti-incumbency story in this election, even among rural women, seen as the unflinching support base of Banerjee.In Nimta, in a modest two-room office cluttered with files, old photographs and posters, the young CPM candidate standing from Dum Dum Uttar, Deepsita Dhar, admits that the Left, which has no MLA in the outgoing assembly, had, before the TMC, been there, done that. “The Syndicate was there” she says, “but its intensity was less. The party managed the Syndicate, now it is more privatised and individualised. In our time, if goons rose within the party, there was a controversy”.In Dhar’s campaign, among other things, she says to voters: “The Left has made mistakes, it has done a lot of things it should not have done, we have paid for it…” That the Left is long out of power gives space to a new generation of leaders to say what the older generation could not, she says.Distancing Didi from ‘chamchas,’ sending her a messageThe chafing at the informal Trinamool network that presses down on the voter is mixed with other discontents that are rising to the surface — above all, the shutdown of industry and the lack of jobs.“There is no karkhana (factory). Someone may get Rs 1,500 (from the TMC’s flagship scheme for women, Lakshmir Bhandar), but if her son gets a job for Rs 20,000, wouldn’t that be so much better?”, asks Moina, in Bhaluka village. “Our sons should get jobs, or they fall into bad ways”, Babita says.In Birampur village, in Howrah, as she sits on the floor, making children’s vests, Sankari Mondal tells a similar story: “Didi has done a lot, she started well, but her chamchas (cadres) don’t let us get the benefits, only favour their own… I haven’t got a pucca house even though I have applied for it. I work the whole day and earn only Rs 4,000 a month. I want more, better paying work. My sons are still studying in class 6 and 12, but I worry about what will happen after they finish school. They have no options. We have seen Didi ki unnati, now let us see Dada’s development.”And in Santoshpur village in Nadia, as she sits in a group of women on the steps outside a house on a still and warm evening, Pinky Das says: “We want naukri (job), not bhatta (cash transfer). We have educated our children with great effort”. She wants Didi to win again, she says, but with a smaller majority. Because “no government should take us for granted,” and because “Didi will not understand this if she gets more seats.”“Change is important,” says Shukla Das. “We have seen Didi, now let’s see the new.” Bengal, she says, should be like Kerala — “they come to power for five years at a time, their governments work well”.Many talk about “ektu poriborton,” a “little change.” The phrase reflects the difficulty of articulating the demand for a bigger transformation in a landscape so dominated by the figure of Mamata Banerjee, larger than life and all her rivals, too. But it also points to the fact that even if the stirring for change is subsumed in a renewed mandate for her, she would have been put on notice.Voters ask for more, BJP waits in the wingsAnd then, it is not just jobs. Those who speak of the need for change point to the uneven development, festering problems like drainage and waterlogging, especially in rural areas. They speak of the “ghuspaithiya” (Bangladeshi illegal immigrant/infiltrator), as a usurper of scarce resources in a declining economy. They speak of an education system that needs rescuing, and the need to shore up women’s security.In Kolkata’s upscale Quest Mall, Sayantan Pal, a Master’s student, says: “When I graduated, my school had 50 teachers. Now there are 20-25. When I passed out of college, there were five teachers in the department of statistics, now only two”. And at the well-lit lake-side promenade in Patuli, Anuradha Mandal, who has completed a degree in history, says: “There are big buildings, but no facilities. Even government teachers don’t send their children to government schools”.Ruma Ghosh, a homemaker, says: “We need a process, just like SIR, to strengthen women’s safety. There is a lack of confidence because the government tried to suppress the facts in the R G Kar rape case.”The voices of change may or may not add up to a mandate against Mamata Banerjee. When it comes to the crunch, they may be overtaken by a larger and heavier sense of her winnability and inevitability.you may likeBut one thing seems apparent: Though the BJP is helped by fears, especially in the lower economic echelons, of the “ghuspaithiya”, and a wider Hindu suspicion of Banerjee’s so-called pro-Muslim politics, in this contest, the BJP is only secondary. Its chances hinge, most of all, on being there, on the other side, if and when her voters turn away from Didi.For all its hectic campaigning, the BJP may only be a receptacle of that vote. And by all accounts, even if she turns away, the voter will not do so without acknowledging the importance of Didi.In this election, then, Didi’s power also frames Didi’s challenge: Whether she and her party are flagging the threat to a fair election posed by an exclusionary SIR, or raising the flag of an endangered Bengali asmita or identity, the spotlight keeps coming back to them in Bengal.