Yashwant Sinha, who headed key ministries when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in power but was sidelined by the Narendra Modi dispensation, on Saturday joined the Trinamul Congress.

Sinha hailed Mamata Banerjee for having “forever been a fighter”.

The former Union minister’s surprise induction into the party took place after a 45-minute meeting with Mamata at her residence on Saturday morning.

Sinha, 83, shared with journalists an anecdote on the fighting spirit he saw and admired in the Bengal chief minister.

He brought up the December 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was taken to Kandahar in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan while on its way from Kathmandu to New Delhi.

Sinha, then the Union finance minister, said on Saturday that at a meeting of the Union cabinet helmed by Vajpayee, Mamata, then the Union railways minister, made a selfless offer.

“Mamataji readily offered herself as a hostage, in exchange of all the hostages… she said she would gladly give herself up to the terrorists, in exchange of the hostages. She said whatever sacrifice was necessary, she would happily make one for the nation,” said Sinha, an Officier de la Legion d’Honneur, the highest civilian distinction of France.

“These are the kind of powers that need to come together today in this fight….This pan-India fight is not just about elections or politics, it’s about protecting the asmita (pride) of the nation and its democracy,” he added.

The acknowledgement as a relentless fighter has come at a time Mamata is fighting one of the most crucial battles of her political career.

Sinha, who was an IAS officer for 24 years before stepping down from the service for a career in politics, held key positions in the Janata Party and the Janata Dal, before a long stint in the BJP.

He and Mamata have been close for decades, and he was seen at various Trinamul events after he quit the BJP in 2018.

The octogenarian attributed the formal plunge to the “tipping point” of the Wednesday evening incident at Nandigram. “The tipping point actually was the attack on Mamataji in Nandigram,” said Sinha.

“Now that I met her today, and she described the (Wednesday evening) incident to me, it became clear to me that the forces the Trinamul Congress and the people of Bengal are today up against, and they can go to any extent. They can get people murdered, they can get them attacked, get them immobilised… any extent, to win an election,” he added.

Sinha, who has been bitterly critical in public for years of the way Modi and Shah have been running his former party and the country, said they have pushed the country into a “very strange situation”.

“Very strange, because the values we used to attach a great deal of importance to, and used to think that everybody would accord due importance to them in our democracy… those values are in danger today. They are not being complied with. We are all familiar with the concept that the strength of a democracy lies in the strength of the institutions of democracy,” he said.

“Today, almost every institution of democracy has weakened. I, with a great deal of regret, have to say that the judiciary too is included in that. There is none that survives with the ability to rein in the government’s arbitrariness. For our nation, this is the greatest danger,” he said, that democracy does not only mean allowing the conduct of elections every five years. “This ruling party (the BJP) has just one objective. To win elections…wherever they take place, at whichever level.”

Sinha said people were free to ask him why he was this critical of the BJP now, after being part of it for so long.

“The party of Atalji’s time and the party now, there is aasmaan zameen ka antar (difference akin to that of the sky and the soil). Atalji used to believe in consensus. The current government believes in crushing. Atalji used to co-opt people. Now, they want to conquer people,” he said.

Sinha recounted how Vajpayee’s NDA was “truly” a national coalition, with prominent representation from every state. “It was never Atalji’s intention to ruin them, to suppress them, so that the space they vacate will be for his party to grasp. The current BJP, who does it have left with it, Except Nitishji’s JDU in Bihar?” asked Sinha.

Sources in Trinamul said Sinha would be sent “right away” to the Rajya Sabha, to fill the vacancy created by Dinesh Trivedi’s departure for the BJP. They said Sinha would be used extensively as a national spokesperson to counter everything Modi and Shah have to throw at Trinamul this campaign season.

Sinha said it was now his duty to make the “foregone conclusion” of Trinamul’s victory in the Assembly elections more “thumping”. “Bengal has to send a message to the entire nation, that the nation will no longer tolerate this, whatever Modi and Shah have been carrying out from Delhi,” he said.

“I have no doubt that this election is extremely important for Bengal’s future, but also for that of the nation’s future. The parivartan (change) of 2024 (the next Lok Sabha polls) in Delhi, the road to that would be paved from Bengal,” he added.