Saffron worry for West Bengal

KOLKATA, May 17 (Reuters): Mamata Banerji is not exactly rejoicing her unusual high-margin victory in West Bengal-and she has a deeper reason than what pundits seem to say.
Most media reports would indicate Mamata has little to worry in West Bengal, what with her bete noire, the Left, totally decimated.
It is true that Modi's anti-Bangladesh tirade helped consolidate West Bengal's minority votes (28pc of the total electorate in the state) behind Mamata Banerji as the Left was seen as not aggressive enough as she was against Modi.
But it is also true that a large part of the Left vote seemed to transfer to the BJP and not to Trinamool, especially in areas of the state with large concentration of non-Bengali population.
The fact that BJP's Tathagatha Roy may have finally lost the South Calcutta seat to Trinamool's Subrata Bakshi is little comfort for Mamata because the BJP leader managed to get more votes than Bakshi in the Bhowanipore assembly segment.
Mamata holds Bhowanipore in the state assembly-so it is like her constituents voting her out. Roy also got 24.81pc of the vote share in the parliament constituency that Mamata had represented before she moved back to state politics.
In 2014, the BJP has bagged its highest ever vote share in West Bengal -- 17.3pc-more than double the share in 2009.
BJP's share in last year's panchayat polls was only 3.5pc and during 2011 assembly polls, it stood at only 4.5pc.
The BJP only got two seats this time like in 1999 -- but then the party's vote share was only 6.5pc and that remained stagnant for a long time.
As state president Rahul Sinha was rejoicing the party's best ever performance, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was in Calcutta on way to Raiganj in North Bengal to oversee a 20-day camp for newly recruited RSS volunteers.
The prime Hindutva organisation already has 60000 fulltime volunteers in the state and Bhagwat seems to have given instructions to recruit as many more within this year, capitalising on the dent Modi and the BJP has electorally made in West Bengal.
And the RSS focus is on youth-especially in districts bordering Bangladesh, focusing on rural folks.
"The RSS network helped BJP during the poll campaign. Now with Modiji to run the country, we will surely do our best to increase our network in Bengal," says RSS state chief Atul Biswas.
The thrust of the RSS campaign is Mamata Banerji's "minority appeasement", her government's decision to pay doles to imams and her many schemes for protecting minority interests.
They also tend to play up attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.
So, while Modi may have helped Mamata by help consolidate minority voters behind her , Mamata's pro-minority stance may help the RSS-BJP gain ground amongst Hindus who feel she is following the Left in 'caring too much for minorities'.
The growing Muslim population over the decades in Bengal will only help the RSS play up the demographic fears to win support and the only way Mamata can counter that is playing up Bengali sub-nationalism, feeding on Delhi's neglect of Bengal.