5 years on, chinks in ruling party's Matua support base

Thakurnagar (North Parganas): Cracks have sur faced in Trinamool Congress' once-formidable Matua vote bank.

Matua thinktank Rabindranath Haldar fumes: “She has sent out 56 Muslims, and not one Matua.We are the game-changers in 80 seats, you know.“

The Matua Dharma Pracharak reiterates how numerically substantial his sect is and recalls the dark SingurNandigram days when Brinda Karat, Biman Bose and others would be at their nonagenarian godmother Binapani De vi's (94) feet to arrest anti-incumbency . But the matriarch had ignored them all and pinned her hopes on the firebrand leader, Mamata Banerjee, making her the chief pa tron of the Matua Mahasangh in 2010.

Six years on, Haldar's words are loaded -with demographic anxieties of the Hindus, Trinamool's pro Muslim posturing and the Matua identity crisis. “She's so busy with the Muslims that she hasn't visited Boroma or Thakurnagar since winning the historic 2011 elections,“ he sighs. Seventy km north of Kolkata, it is the headquarters of Namasudras (formerly Chandal), a sub-sect that forms Bengal's second largest scheduled caste (SC) population. Noni Goshain, who escaped religion-based persecution in the Bengali Muslim homeland years ago, avers: “If Bengal has 3 crore Muslims, it also has 1.5 crore Matuas.“

The motley Matuas, touted as the most united face of Bengali Hindu vote bank, are adept at number crunching.The 2011 Census puts the Namasudra count at 35.05 lakh, out of Bengal's 2.15 crore SC populace. Even if half the Namasudras belong to the Matua faith, there couldn't be any more than 17 lakh Matuas in Bengal. Not many of them have voting rights.

The thumping victory for Trinamool in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls seems to have emboldened the CM to look beyond the Matua first family now and field a non-Matua for Gaighata. “Who's Pulin Behari Roy? I'm told he lives in Salt Lake. The 70 lakh Matua voters will not accept his candidature,“ Goshain seethes. The angst relates to the 2003 Citizenship Amendment Act that categorized post-1971 Bangladeshi refugees as infiltrators and Mamata's forgotten promise to fight for the legislation's repeal.

During his 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, Narendra Modi had taunted Mamata over the Matua insecurity and assured a re-think on the act. But this election, BJP ooks unsure. It has come up with a `reluctant' candidate, Sankar Thakur, who claims to be a Matua. “The Modi wave has gone. It's time for some ground realities,“ says CPI's Kapilkrishna Thakur, the namesake of the late MP and a Matua in his own right. Hoping to cash in on the citizenship fiasco, the man, who set up Nikhil Bharat Bangali Udbastu Samonnoy Samity for citizenship of Bangladeshi Hindus in 2000, says, “Matua or not, voters are warming up to me.“

Boroma's daughter-in-law and the sitting Bongaon MP , Mamatabala, is caught off guard on citizenship issue.“Sougata da (Roy) has moved it in Parliament,“ she says.