May 10, 2021 Share TINY TWIST IN the tail can sometimes tell us more than a spin of the head. While the headlines of the Bengal election go to Mamata Banerjee, there is much to learn from the fate of a party which won only one seat out of the 292 in the new Assembly. It was an instant project which adopted a grand name for the ballot: Rashtriya Secular Majlis Party. It also called itself the Indian Secular Front. Its objective was slightly less inclusive: it positioned itself as the electoral vehicle of the Bengali Muslim vote. The al-leged lure was its association with the venerated Furfura Sharif shrine in rural Hooghly. A long queue of experienced politicians, sombre-faced leftist and rightist opinion-makers, and industrious journalists immediately pronounced that the oratory of its leader, 34-year-old Abbas Siddiqui, and the sanctity of the shrine would magnetise the Muslim vote towards this upstart entity.