KOLKATA: Violence, before, during and after elections, is mundane in its regularity in West Bengal. This is how it has been for 50 years or more. The concentration of violence around the panchayat elections, held on May 14, indicates that the incumbent and opposition parties used it as a strategy to influence the process of elections, the outcomes and followed it up after the counting of votes to punish certain segments for voting in specific ways, or as a signal of the victor’s capacity to extract revenge on enemy turf.

Over 60 people died in this panchayat elections in West Bengal and the killings have not stopped. In one week, starting June 4, three people died. Two persons, both in Purulia, were found hanging; one from a tree with a vendetta note tacked to his T-shirt; the other, from a transmission tower, which the police rushed to declare a suicide and then confirmed it after post-mortem examination.

The cold-blooded killing of Trilochan Mahato, all of 20, points to a political purpose; the tacked note on his body said it was punishment for his allegiance to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The second person, Dulal Kumar, was also a BJP worker. There is no explanation for his suicide. BJP leaders, who organised road blocks to protest the deaths, insisted that the Trinamool Congress was responsible.

The third person, Mohsin Khan, a local Trinamool Congress leader from a village in Howrah, was shot and killed; his wife contested and won in the panchayat elections on a Trinamool Congress ticket. Local party workers and the district leaders alleged that the BJP was responsible.

In every instance of deliberately planned and executed killing in West Bengal, there is a political purpose. The bodies are pawns in a game for territorial gain. The dead are not victims of a clash between armed and prepared rival political parties that went out of control, which is bad, but not the same as targeted killings.

Instead of limiting intervention with the free and fair election process to voter intimidation and booth capture, this panchayat election witnessed a far deeper invasion. The Trinamool Congress worked to a plan; it anticipated the danger that it faced from the BJP as a determined and resourceful challenger on the one hand, and the weakness of its long-time rivals, the Communist Party of India Marxist-led Left Front and the Congress, on the other. As the panchayat election process unfolded, it became evident that the Trinamool Congress was working to reduce risk and had adopted a strategy of containing all the opposition by simply taking over the elections.

The strategies of capture included the messages before the panchayat election date was announced. There was widespread apprehension of serious violence, to intimidate political opponents and voters. What was not anticipated was the extent of capture that revealed itself during the nomination process. More than 34% of the seats had been won by the Trinamool Congress before polling day, because there were no other candidates. The tactics used were to establish foolproof control over the nomination process. Therefore, specific targets were identified, like the offices of the block development offices and the sub-divisional offices of the government; muscle, arms and bombs were deployed to restrict access to these places. The purpose was to prevent filing of nominations by the assorted opposition parties against the Trinamool Congress or to prevent disgruntled Trinamool Congress leaders from doing so.

People who study elections say that violence as part of the election process is the shortest route to political power. The election related violence in West Bengal overturns this proposition, because almost everyone, from the various keen observers of politics closeted over tea at road-side stalls and street corners, to professionals who analyse it, hold the Trinamool Congress responsible. The question that has everyone puzzled is why would the ruling party, one that already dominates the political turf in West Bengal, resort to such carefully strategised violence to interfere in an election that it would have easily and overwhelmingly won?

The Trinamool Congress, theoretically, had no need to be seen as the perpetrator of political “executions”, as happened in Purulia. It is already in power. It has established itself as an unrivalled power in West Bengal, going by the unprecedented number of seats that it has won where elections were held, and in the 34% seats where elections were not required as no opposition candidate had filed nomination papers. The party is in control of 12 of the 19 zilla parishads — Jalpaiguri, South Dinajpur, Murshidabad, South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Hooghly, East Midnapore, West Midnapore, East Burdwan, West Burdwan, Birbhum and Bankura districts. And it is likely to take control of one more, that is Malda. A triumphant and utterly confident chief minister Mamata Banerjee said of the results that it was a victory for her policies and a defeat of the overly ambitious.

The logic of the argument would suggest that it is parties like the BJP that theoretically would look to use violence to leap frog their way from the bottom of the political heap to a position of seriously threatening the Trinamool Congress’ supremacy.

Violence is being used in West Bengal, before, during and after the panchayat elections to produce pre-determined outcomes. Accusations against the BJP, of using guns and muscle for hire, allegedly from neighbouring states, would imply that the political pundits are correct in pointing to the connection between violence and fast-tracking its way to a more powerful position in West Bengal. But the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) links to violence requires a different explanation.

The violence with which TMC is being associated, by its political rivals and critics as well as the thousands of ‘common people,’ a phrase Banerjee frequently used in the past, exposes its compulsion to do so even at the cost of widespread condemnation, which to a limited extent tarnishes her image, however temporarily. It is best understood as a strategy to secure the state before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The Trinamool Congress needs to put itself in an unassailable position now in order to fulfill its larger ambitions on the national scene ahead of the 2019 elections. Ever since the fracas of the President’s election in 2012, when Banerjee tried to get a consensus candidate elected in Pranab Mukherjee’s place, she has been determinedly barrelling ahead in making a space for her party in national politics.

In the past six to eight months, this ambitious project has gained momentum. The TMC is the second largest political party in the opposition in the Lok Sabha and its new role and amibitions match that position. The idea of the Federal Front that Banerjee is advocating makes it imperative that TMC is invincible in West Bengal in 2019 in order to be free to play a significant role in constituting the collective of regional parties, leading it in negotiating deals that pit one united opposition candidate against the BJP in as many seats as possible and finally, positioning herself as one of several prime ministerial candidates, if the opposition wins.

An uncertain domination with a new and aggressive challenger in the shape of the BJP in West Bengal was a risk that Banerjee clearly wanted to remove. She did it by denying that there was violence during the panchayat election process. As the leader, her fierce defence of her party’s electioneering tactics, challenging the opposition’s accusations that their candidates had been prevented from filing nominations, was clearly understood as a message that she was committed, and credibly so, to the use of force to capture the panchayati raj institutions by holding off all rivals.

Generalisations that Banerjee derailed the democratic process by excluding rivals claiming the right to represent the voters of the constituency, summarised as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s outcry that what happened in West Bengal during the panchayat elections was a “murder of democracy”, cut no ice in the melt proof, shock-resistant bubble that is in the final stages of construction.

Violence as a strategy for consolidation has spiralled and is likely to continue to do so as the intensity of the competition between the BJP, as the distant second and the anti-BJP collective of regional parties and the Congress increases. The declaration by TMC leaders that districts like Malda would become “no opposition” zones is a measure of how far the consolidation process has progressed as a strategy of establishing unrivalled power. In 2019, at this rate of progress, the party will win most of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal, up from the 38 seats it currently holds.

It is intriguing that Banerjee’s strategic contribution to the formation of a Federal Front reflects the same ‘no opposition zone’ model. Her advice to other regional parties is to pit one common candidate against the BJP in every constituency. It also makes her a leader that the BJP has reasons to identify as a threat in 2019.

The violence in West Bengal is a reflection of the tension building up in national politics, where every dominant regional party in every state must maximise its performance to corner the BJP. Uninterrupted violence is not possible, even for West Bengal. There will be ceasefires. But, these ceasefires will not be in the same seasons as in the past; such suspensions of hostilities will follow a different calendar.

The Durga Puja season has forever been a period of celebration. For the past two years, it has become a contest between the TMC and the BJP for converting a ‘secular’ celebration into a moment when religious allegiance is organised as a performance of Hindu identity. Eid was the other season. For the BJP, the massing of the minorities on the public road was a major offense in 2017; perhaps this will be re-enacted now. It would be trite to predict that the volatile combination of politics and religion is fairly certain to result in violence.

The pattern of violence in West Bengal indicates that a new strategic blueprint for using violence has been developed. Its goal is to turn the state into an invincible fortress for the TMC.

Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist based in Kolkata.