Before the election season kicks off in earnest in West Bengal ahead of next year’s Assembly polls, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP are battling it out on the maidans of the state.
On September 11, the BJP kicked off a weeklong football tournament in Howrah district called the Narendra Cup. It was launched on the occasion of the anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s historic speech in Chicago at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893, and the BJP said that was its inspiration (Swami Vivekananda was born Narendranath Dutta). However, the tournament will conclude on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday on Wednesday (September 17).
In response, the Mamata Banerjee government launched the even-bigger Swami Vivekananda Cup the following day — more than 1,300 teams are set to participate in 43 small tournaments — and it is set to continue till March 2026, the eve of the elections.
That both the ruling party and the Opposition are attempting to use football as a political tool in an attempt to win the youth vote comes as no surprise, given that the 18 to 19-year-olds or first-time voters made up 2.02% of the electorate in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls (as per Census 2011, 20 to 29-year-olds make up 18.2% of Bengal’s population). Then there are the neighbourhood clubs, which play a crucial role in shaping the political choices of their members. The popularity of the sport though extends beyond the 18-29 age category, with men in their thirties and forties also intimately involved in these clubs and the game locally.
The role clubs play
For decades, the neighbourhood clubs have played a crucial role in Bengali society and politics, more so in the countryside. After the Left Front came to power in 1977, Bengal underwent a socio-political shift. In Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India, political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya writes about the emergence of party-society — a system where the political party becomes central to social life — in the Bengal countryside. “The party mediates access to the state, resources, rights and entitlements, and becomes the principal channel through which locality is governed and social relations are organised,” he writes.
As the country embraced the open market starting in the 1990s, Bhattacharyya writes that the traditional leadership of the Left in the countryside — the older guard consisting of idealists — was replaced by “petty entrepreneurs”, or promoters in the local parlance who “slowly but steadily captured the nerve centres of the local geography of power – the cooperatives, the school boards, the sports clubs, the panchayat bodies, the party committees and so on”.
The clubs were one of the many avenues through which the CPI(M) and the broader Left exercised their control.
As the edifice of Left hegemony crumbled following the mass movements in Singur and Nandigram, the TMC came to power in 2011. However, the Mamata Banerjee-led party did not have an organisation as regimented and disciplined as that of the CPI(M). “To make for its lack of an ‘institutional’ party, the TMC struck alliances with the local clubs and community leaders and made them beneficiaries of government funding. Simultaneously, in line with the overall logic of party society, it attempted to make sure that the rural localities were ‘cleansed’ of all oppositional groups,” Bhattacharyya writes.
Later, he posited that the party-society devolved into franchisee politics in which the TMC allowed local strongmen and party operators to run semi-autonomous fiefdoms, distributing welfare benefits, managing electoral mobilisation through them.
‘Khela Hobe’
However, the clubs continued to play an important role in the TMC’s scheme of things, as illustrated by the sops the party rains on them during the annual Durga Puja. Add to that the popularity of the game in Bengal, and it is easy to see why both the TMC and BJP have zeroed in on football.
In a state famous for one of the oldest derbies in the world — East Bengal vs Mohun Bagan — and featuring clubs with a storied anti-colonial past, the TMC, which has deep ties with both, has often employed sporting idioms for political ends. In the run-up to the 2021 Assembly elections, CM Mamata Banerjee popularised the “Khela Hobe (the game is on)” slogan, and has often been pictured kicking a football at the party’s public events. TMC second-in-command and Diamond Harbour MP Abhishek Banerjee, her nephew, is the chief patron of Diamond Harbour FC, this year’s runner-up in the Durand Cup.
Launching the Narendra Cup last week, state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya insisted it was not linked to politics or “Narendra Modi” but organised to honour Swami Vivekananda. TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh claimed that it was another “Naren” who was the inspiration for the BJP, naming “Naren Gosai”, who turned approver for the British in the Alipore bomb case and was gunned down by revolutionaries.
It was the TMC government-hosted event, which was linked to Swami Vivekananda, Ghosh said.
A senior CPI(M) leader said the popularity of football makes it an attractive means to reach out to the youth in Bengal, but admitted that sponsorship is a problem for the youth wing of the Left party that has been on the decline.
Targeting both the TMC and the BJP, another CPI(M) leader, Shatarup Ghosh, said, “They are playing the same game of football, sometimes in the TMC’s half, sometimes in the BJP’s. You can see it from the names they use; both sides invoke the same figure for their tournament. In politics too, the TMC and the BJP share the same understanding when it comes to fooling the people of Bengal.”