Corridors of Power: Rhea's turn to resonate in Bengal

If Bihar's political parties have adopted Sushant Singh Rajput as a mascot of sorts in the election curtain-raiser, neighbouring West Bengal can't be far behind. West Bengal votes April 2021. It has suddenly dawned on eager-beaver Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury that he could make political capital of SSR's partner, Rhea Chakraborty. A day after Sonia Gandhi tasked Chowdhury to head the West Bengal Congress, his first discovery was Rhea is a "Bengali Brahmin" and a "soft target" for the BJP, though the connection between a fact (a half fact, because her mother is a Konkani speaking Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) and a surmise is incomprehensible. The Trinamool Congress and the Left chimed in so don't be surprised if the copycats come up with solidarity posters for Rhea, "amaar meye" (our daughter), in Kolkata after the BJP plastered Bihar with "we won't forget SSR" billboards. The fraught SSR-Rhea saga, which has taken a toll on the families, especially Rhea's, is elevating the protagonists to cult status in a silly season where nothing else seemingly matters to the political players.

The theatrical piece has begun to recoil on the BJP, which was the first off the mark in the joust to create an icon. It can scarcely accuse Chowdhury of alluding to Rhea's Brahmin origin because in West Bengal, which claimed to be above and beyond caste and used the shibboleth to perpetuate rule by the Brahmins and Kayasthas, the BJP pulled caste out of latency and moulded it into an electoral determinant. Dilip Ghosh, the motormouth state president, is pitched as an OBC leader who will demolish the might of the caste Hindu if the BJP is elected to power. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, through a mix of strategy, symbols and sops, it took the Matua, an influential Dalit grouping, away from the Trinamool. The Congress and the Trinamool probably hope that if their campaigns theme Rhea's victimhood and vilification, it might strike a chord with the urban, middle-class Bengali who hasn't quite warmed up to the BJP.

There are signs that the BJP is out of its depth in Maharashtra after the central party unleashed actor Kangana Ranaut on the Thackerays. It should have better pre-judged the Shiv Sena, its former ally, than imagine that Uddhav Thackeray's passive mien would make him an easy target of Kangana's ferocity. The Shiv Sena has Sanjay Raut in its arsenal and he gave it back as good as the Sena got, in fact a notch or two higher. All it took Raut was to paint Kangana as anti-Maharashtra and the BJP was forced to nuance its reaction. Devendra Fadnavis might be chuffed when he was picked to mind the Bihar polls with Bhupender Yadav, but Maharashtra gives him the political zunka bhakar. Take Maharashtra away and Fadnavis can put his national ambitions away. It's easier for the Sena to explain away the BMC's demolition overreach on Kangana's offices than for Fadnavis to endorse her egregious remark on "Mumbai-as-PoK".

With or without Rhea in the backdrop, the BJP is in a pickle in West Bengal. It wants to have a face to confront Mamata Banerjee, who's turned every election into an I-versus-the-rest battle, and it doesn't want one because there are too many claimants knocking for attention on the Delhi brass' door, as though the election is for the BJP to win. The problem is Ghosh, whose latest assertion, that the Covid virus was mythically kept alive by Mamata to thwart the BJP's public rallies, is irrepressible. May be that's how Delhi envisaged his role, as someone brassy to put down a pugnacious Mamata. While Mamata's political moves are almost always adroit, Ghosh gives an impression that he's not in tune with West Bengal's political shades. When a woman was heckled by the crowds for protesting the siege on the Jamia Millia Islamia University at a pro-CAA meeting in Kolkata, Ghosh said she was lucky that "nothing more was done to her". His remark that Indian cows were "superior" to western breeds because there were traces of gold in their milk offended the state's "bhadralok", unused to affronts to its sensibility.

Ghosh has a competitor in Tathagata Roy, the former Meghalaya governor, who parachuted into the electoral arena just in time. Roy hasn't cloaked his political ambitions. Those who know him said he cited the examples of Motilal Vora, Arjun Singh and Siddharatha Shankar Ray who left their Raj Bhawans and returned to the political tumult. Remember how he raised the hackles of the football fans who, while celebrating the East Bengal Athletic Club centenary, were asked why West Bengal should support "another country"? The BJP's brand of ultra-nationalism hasn't fully gone down in West Bengal, which still holds the eastern border as a geographical divide and not a cultural separation.

From time to time, the BJP whips out its more "acceptable" faces such as Babul Supriyo (who tut-tuts when Ghosh goes ballistic), Swapan Dasgupta or Anirab Ganguly, who heads a think tank in Delhi, to try and appease the "gentlefolk". The dilemma persists and a resolution might well tilt in Ghosh or Roy's favour. Last week, JP Nadda, the BJP president, accused Mamata of being "anti-Hindu" for bringing West Bengal under a lockdown on August 5, the day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the ground-breaking ceremony for the Ayodhya temple. Will "nationalism" and religion trump regionalism in the elections?