'Lakshmir Bhandar' tilted scales for Mamata, poor candidate choice cost BJP steeply: I-PAC chief

NEW DELHI: 'Lakshmir Bhandar', the monthly cash assistance scheme for women in West Bengal, was the "game changer" for Mamata Banerjee in the 2024 parliamentary polls, feels Pratik Jain, co-founder and director of I-PAC, the professional consulting agency advising the Trinamool Congress on elections and politics. Speaking to PTI after Banerjee led the TMC to a thumping victory in the state over its prime challenger BJP, Jain said "botched up candidate choice" by the saffron camp could also be the reason behind the party's poor show in the state where it was restricted to just 12 of the total 42 seats.

The Mamata Banerjee-led party trounced the BJP in the elections bagging 29 seats.

Jain, known as PJ in his inner circles, took up the agency's mantle after Prashant Kishor quit the organization post-2021 state polls. The party won a landslide victory in the 2023 rural body polls, whose strategies he devised, a year after it successfully resisted the BJP juggernaut in the state to win 215 out of the 292 assembly seats.

"I kept quiet before, although my assessment for Bengal differed widely from Kishor's prediction. Had I spoken then, it would have pitted me directly against my former boss," Jain laughed, referring to Kishor's pre-counting statements that BJP would improve upon its earlier tally of 18 seats, maybe even go up to 30.

Jain said Banerjee's women-centric beneficiary schemes like 'Lakshmir Bhandar', 'Kanyashree' and 'Sabuj Sathi' turned the table in favour of the TMC, especially in Bengal countryside, given that nearly 50 per cent of the state's electorate were women and nearly 2.3 crore financially weak women currently get a direct monthly aid of Rs 1000 from Lakshmir Bhandar alone.

"The money didn't just address their financial woes, it gave the state's rural women their much-needed empowerment," Jain stated.

Talking about why BJP's campaign focus on women voters failed to click, Jain said, "Their campaigns were largely negative and focused around Sandeshkhali. Few people believed them. And when the sting operation videos discrediting BJP's claims came out, that hit the final nail in their coffin. As for PM Modi's claims of Lakhpati Didis, we failed to locate a single beneficiary of that scheme in Bengal."

Jain said certain candidate choices made by the BJP amounted to their political hara-kiri. "When they announced their list, we were aghast. Relocating Dilip Ghosh to Bardhaman-Durgapur not only cost the party that seat, but also two additional seats... those of Medinipur, from where Ghosh was moved, and Asansol where Agnimitra Paul, who replaced Ghosh in Medinipur and lost, had a fighting chance," Jain said.

"Our job was also made easy with the saffron camp repeating candidates like Locket Chatterjee in Hooghly and Subhas Sarkar in Bankura who, surveys confirmed, were facing high anti-incumbencies," he added.

The poll advisor, however, admitted that he was jittered by the exit polls which predicted a landslide victory for the BJP in the state.

"We began questioning ourselves and wondered what we missed," he said, adding that the agency's internal assessments said that the Trinamool would win at least 23 seats with no upper limit depending on response from women voters.

Jain revealed how the organization returned to its drawing board after the Ayodhya Ram Mandir consecration ceremony in January this year prompted an internal survey that showed a 5 per cent swing in favour of the BJP in Bengal.

"While a significant section of people believed that Modiji was good for the Centre after Ram Mandir happened, we devised a campaign around how his policies have primarily remained anti-Bengal. Our central slogan 'Jonogoner Gorjon, Bangla Birodhider Bisorjon' took shape from that idea. TMC's campaign focused on why people should vote for the party and give it better representation in the Parliament for their own security and protection," the poll strategist said.

Asked if that strategy endorsed parochialism, Jain said that the only way to counter Modi's "nationalism" narrative for the polls was to devise a counter-narrative of "sub-nationalism" for the voters of the state. "A vote to BJP will mean a vote against Bengal. That was our line," he stated.

Jain claimed credit for successfully meeting two prime challenges cropping up before the TMC in the run-up to the polls.

"The first was managing the inner-party conflicts," Jain said. "We aggressively tackled those infighting blocks by escalating them up to Abhishek Banerjee and, where necessary, even to Didi. By the final week before the polls, 85 to 90 per cent fractures were taken care of."

Next, Jain added, was to effectively separate the public outreach module from that of organizational matters between Mamata Banerjee and her nephew, Abhishek.

"Didi shouldered the burden of people's interaction by holding 107 public meetings and road shows. Abhishek, on the other hand, held 15 internal review meetings in problematic seats and 72 meetings plus road shows," he informed.

What if the results went kaput instead of what it turned out to be? "I was ready to take the hit. I know I would have been single-handedly blamed if the results went the other way. It was a make or break election for me where I had invested my entire professional capital I earned over the last decade," Jain said, while calling the Bengal results his "career's biggest win".

The strategist said that the I-PAC team was now on a break after a harrowing few months of work.