West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee is “desperate” to have a tie-up with the Congress Party, not to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party at the national level, but to safeguard her home turf from the BJP, say sources close to the leader.
They say that Mamata’s surprise suggestion at the Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc meeting in New Delhi on Tuesday, that the alliance should have a face—either as a convener or as a prime ministerial candidate and then her going on to name Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, was part of her wellthought out plan to be on the right side of the Grand Old Party.
Sources say that the Trinamool Congress has repeatedly emphasised that it wanted the seat sharing plan among the I.N.D.I.A. bloc to be finalised by the end of the year, especially in West Bengal. “Mamata knows that the state Congress unit is not eager to tie up with the Trinamool, given the latter’s track-record of weakening the Congress by engineering defections.
That is why she is desperate to curry favour with Kharge, since, in the Congress, the high command’s word is law,” says Prof Biswanath Chakraborty, psephologist and professor of political science at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. She knows that only the High Command can overrule the state unit, and command it to toe the line keeping the interests of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc,” he added.
“She is the only leader who has made unsolicited suggestions about some other party at the I.N.D.I.A. bloc meeting. Who is Mamata to say that Kharge should be the face of the alliance when he is a leader of the Congress Party? Who is Mamata to say that the Congress Party should fight the BJP in 300 seats?” asked veteran political observer Suman Chattopadhyay.
The devil, say political observers, lies in the details. In the 2021 Assembly elections, the TMC polled 28,650,917 votes and got 47.93% vote share. The BJP on the other hand polled 22,798,411 votes and bagged a vote share of 38.1%. The CPM, which didn’t win a single seat, polled 2,820,908 votes and managed a vote share of 4.72%. The Congress polled 1,757,148 and had a vote share of 2.94%.
The rise of the Indian Secular Front formed in West Bengal by Abbas Siddiqui, an influential cleric of the shrine of Furfura Sharif in Hooghly district, which aligned itself with the Left Front and the Congress Party has left Mamata worried, say Trinamool insiders.
Abbas Siddiqui’s younger brother Nawshad Siddiqui was elected as a legislator from the Muslim-dominated Bhangar constituency. His 42-day detention in jail soon after an innocuous demonstration has disillusioned many Muslim voters, say political watchers.
In the 2021 Assembly elections, the Trinamool Congress’ 48% voteshare had a 23% component of Muslim votes. With the West Bengal Congress not eager to tie up with the Trinamool and the Bengal unit of the CPM, too, having made it clear that it will snap its electoral understanding with the Congress if the latter finds an ally in the Trinamool Congress, a split in minority support between Congress and the Trinamool Congress could work to the advantage of the BJP.
In the last Assembly elections, Trinamool got around 48%, BJP came second with 38.13% and the Left and Congress together got about 7.5%. Sources close to Mamata say that she is worried that if the Congress, the Left Front and the ISF come together and align themselves against the Trinamool, then the Trinamool’s Muslim vote bank will be divided and that will be advantage BJP.
With the BJP preparing to go to the electoral battle after the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, which may attract Hindu votes, a split in the Muslim vote bank will put the Trinamool Congress in a problematic situation, says Chakraborty.
BJP spokesperson Shamik Bhattacharya told The Sunday Guardian, “Mamata Banerjee knows very well that the Trinamool Congress won the last Assembly and panchayat elections only due to muscle-power and the biased actions of the police and the administration, including her puppet Chief Electoral Officer. The Lok Sabha elections will be totally different because the Election Commission and the Central forces will not allow any hanky-panky and the people who have seen the corruption and the venality of the Trinamool Congress in all spheres, will teach them a lesson.”