When West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee attends the Opposition parties’ meeting in Bengaluru on Tuesday, possibly accompanied by nephew and the party’s All-India General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee, she will be confident to stick to her position that the TMC be allowed to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengal on its own — reiterating her old formula that whoever is strongest against the BJP should contest from that place.
Mamata believes the TMC is the force for Bengal, just like Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in Delhi, and other Opposition forces should stay away from the poll scene in these states to ensure the BJP’s defeat in the highest number of seats.
If a senior leader of the party is to be believed, the party’s sweeping victory in the violence-marred panchayat elections has strengthened the party’s confidence to go alone even in the traditional Congress strongholds of Murshidabad and Malda districts, from where the Congress still has two sitting MPs. The Grand Old Party has a negligible presence in the rest of the state.
In 2019, a sharp division of votes between the TMC and Congress helped the BJP win a Lok Sabha seat from the Muslim-majority Malda district. However, TMC leaders believe this time they are comfortably ahead of others.
For the Left and the Congress leadership in Bengal, the TMC’s presence in the meeting is a cause of discomfort, as it is by fighting the TMC on the ground that they have started regaining lost votes and managed to improve their vote share, despite violence allegedly by the ruling party, even as the BJP suffered a massive erosion in its vote share compared to the 2021 assembly election.
This issue is so sensitive that in the CPI(M)’s mouthpiece, Ganashakti, a report on the first Opposition meeting in Patna was accompanied by a photo of the gathering that did not include Mamata, who was very much present there.
Now, after the panchayat election results have provided especially the Left and to some extent the Congress a silver lining after reaching their nadir in 2021, any softening of stance against the TMC could spoil their gains.
The TMC, on the other hand, is bent on its demand that the Congress will have to stop criticising the TMC in Bengal to get the party’s support outside the state. “It is unacceptable that they will be friends with me in Delhi and disturb me constantly in Bengal,” the TMC supremo said in Kolkata earlier this week. This is a reiteration of her demand made several times in the past that Congress will have to stop criticising her.
“Her demand is unacceptable to us. She wants us to give up our party’s existence in Bengal. The Left and the Congress are constantly together in the national sphere, while in Kerala the parties strongly criticise each other. The Kerala equation has not spoiled their national-level understanding,” a senior leader of Bengal Congress, who did not want to be named, tells Outlook.
The bone of contention between the Congress and the TMC would be the five Lok Sabha seats in Murshidabad and Malda districts of central Bengal, which used to be a Congress bastion but the TMC swept in the 2021 assembly election.
Even in the recent panchayat elections, the TMC has maintained its superiority over the Congress.
The Congress, on the other hand, believes that the TMC’s panchayat election results have been inflated by electoral malpractices and that the Congress’ actual position is far better than what the rural poll results indicate. They hope to retain both seats they won in 2019 in a triangular contest.
The Congress top leadership, nevertheless, showed no lack of intent in getting TMC on board, as Sonia Gandhi herself dialled Mamata Banerjee to ensure her presence in the meeting.
“We are aware that any kind of understanding with the TMC in Bengal would ensure all Opposition votes go to the BJP,” says the Bengal Congress leader, adding that he ‘hoped’ the TMC would finally walk out of the Opposition alliance preferring a post-poll alliance over a pre-poll one.
“In Bengal, the situation demands that the Left and the Congress contest as a third force against both the TMC and the BJP. A majority of our voters would never vote for the TMC, no matter what the party calls for,” says a senior CPI(M) leader.
He feels the compulsion of national politics is keeping the confronting forces together at the national scale but ultimately alliances would take shape going by equations of state politics.
“Alliance isn’t always good. If the Left and the Congress join hands in Kerala, it may end up conceding seats to the BJP, but they would possibly keep the BJP at bay by fighting each other. The case of Bengal is similar,” the leader opines.
Besides, the Left and the TMC coming to any sort of even tacit understanding is beyond considering, the leader says.
Under such a scenario, it remains to be seen what role the TMC plays at the gathering of Opposition leaders and how other players respond to them. After all, the TMC was seen in a leadership role in several such Opposition party gatherings in the past and even tried to build a platform with Congress in a lesser role, but the recent initiatives have mostly been taken by Congress and its allies.
