After TMC heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari joined the BJP, taking along with him six other MLAs, in December, veteran Congress leader Abdul Mannan had said that it “felt good to see the TMC got a taste of its own medicine”. The Congress should have had no reason to rejoice the BJP’s gain in strength but old wounds run deep. The TMC, since severing its ties with the Congress in 2012, embarked on a journey to destroy the Congress and got a series of elected public representatives, from panchayat and municipality members to MLAs and even MPs, to defect to the TMC. The Left parties, too, lost nearly a dozen of MLAs to the TMC.
And in a matter of just three years, the BJP has shown a greater ‘strike rate’ than the TMC in engineering defections. It now has in its leaderships former TMC leaders like Rajya Sabha MP and Mamata Banerjee’s former right-hand man Mukul Roy, former ministers Suvendu Adhikari, Sovan Chatterjee and Rajib Banerjee and Lok Sabha MPs Saumitra Khan and Sunil Mandal and many MLAs.
“The TMC introduced the culture of political poaching in Bengal. Before the TMC’s ascent to power in 2011, Bengal hardly saw leaders switching camps,” said psephologist Biswanath Chakraborty, a professor of political science at Rabindra Bharati University in Calcutta. “Left and Congress leaders have repeatedly written to the assembly speaker seeking disqualification of MLAs who jumped ship, but never has any action been taken.”
For the first five decades after Independence, Bengal’s politics remained largely bipolar, with the Congress and the CPI(M) being the main rivals. The Congress has suffered splits, such as the Bangla Congress in the 1960s and the Trinamool Congress in 1998. There were examples of Congress leaders joining these new outfits and then returning. But there was no switching camps from the Left to the Congress, or the other way round.
After the TMC came to power, the first MLA to change camp was veteran Congress leader Krishnendu Narayan Chowdhury, in 2012, and another veteran leader Ajoy Dey in 2013. However, what the state witnessed in February 2014 was entirely unprecedented—two Congress MLAs and three Left MLAs votes for the TMC’s candidate in the Rajya Sabha elections. Cross-voting had entered Bengal politics, courtesy Mukul Roy.
Two of these cross-voters were rewarded with Lok Sabha tickets in 2014—Sunil Mandal won from Burdwan East and Dasharath Tirkey of Revolutionary Socialist Party background won from Alipurduar. Tirkey, who lost the 2019 Lok Sabha elections to a BJP candidate, has also joined the BJP in December 2020.
The TMC’s poaching drive did not stop. Even ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it got Congress MP Mausam Noor to contest on its ticket. In 2020, the party got another CPI(M) MLA and a Congress legislator to join the TMC.
Nevertheless, with the BJP also managing to induct half-a-dozen Left and Congress MLAs, the TMC is facing an unprecedented challenge in its own game.
By Snigdhendu Bhattacharya in Calcutta
