Barely days short of four months since her last visit to Delhi, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is on her way to the national capital for a four-day visit to meet her party MPs, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
According to Trinamul sources, Mamata has also sought an appointment with UPA chairperson and Congress working president Sonia Gandhi, which is yet to be finalised.
Since her last meeting with Sonia on July 28, the Trinamul leadership including its hired brain Prashant Kishore have upped the ante against the grand old party and also engineered defections. Two former Congress leaders, who had served the party with distinction for years, Luizinho Faleiro of Goa and Sushmita Dev from Assam, have been sent to the Rajya Sabha on a Trinamul ticket in these four months.
Prashant Kishore, with help from Trinamul mouthpiece Jago Bangla and some of its functionaries, have been undermining the Congress’ role in any anti-BJP platform to prop up Mamata as the only credible face of the Opposition against Modi. “Both the times the request for a meeting with Soniaji came from Mamata’s office. Last time she did get an audience. Soniaji did not ask for a meeting with her. Look at the way Mamata has reciprocated in these few months,” said an AICC member.
Mamata and Kejriwal share common ground in Goa where both parties are keen to project themselves as the alternative to both the ruling BJP and the once formidable Congress in the tiny western state. In Goa, for example, the difference in vote share between the BJP and the Congress was less than four per cent. The Congress did bag the most number of seats but a steady stream of desertions has weakened the party electorally. Yet, voters in Goa have not yet completely deserted the party.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress nominee from South Goa, Francisco Sardinha, won with over 47 per cent of the total votes, which was a spike of less than seven per cent since 2014. The Aam Aadmi Party, which failed to win any seat in the 2017 Goa Assembly polls, managed just about seven per cent of the votes in the Lok Sabha elections, almost equal to what it had in the Assembly polls.
The Trinamul had not contested from the state in either the Assembly or the Lok Sabha polls in 2017 and 2019. It did participate in the 2012 Assembly elections, where it received 1.81 per cent of the valid votes, contesting 20 seats and its candidates had forfeited deposits in 19 of those seats.
On the other hand, in the northeastern state of Tripura, sandwiched between Myanmar and Bangladesh, Trinamul has been posing itself as a serious contender for governance for many years now. In the 24 seats that it contested in 2018, Trinamul received a total of 6,989 votes with nominees' deposits forfeited in all the seats. The party’s vote share was less than one per cent. The party had not contested in the previous elections held in 2013. The BJP had in 2018 got 43.59 per cent of the votes, while the CPM which came second had a vote share of 42.22 per cent.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, however, the Congress which had managed only 1.79 per cent of the votes in the Assembly elections a year ago, jumped to the second spot in both seats of Tripura East and West, bagging 26.58 per cent and 24.18 per cent votes. The Trinamul contested in only one seat, Tripura West, and got 0.78 per cent votes.
Significantly, contrary to the scenario that played out in Bengal since 2009 when a portion of the Left vote started swinging towards the Trinamul propelling Mamata Banerjee to power, in Tripura it is the Congress which has benefitted, much to the annoyance of both the BJP and the Trinamul.
The former chief minister, Manik Sarkar, too was caught in the violence unleashed by BJP cadres in the state as late as September this year, when his convoy was blocked. The BJP then had to beat a retreat as the CPM cadres resisted. That incident on September 6 at Dhanpur, had led to arson, looting and violence in the heart of Agartala and spread to other districts two days later. The CPM’s state headquarters, offices of five media houses, local offices of the Left parties in the districts and homes of countless Leftists and supporters were ransacked and set ablaze.
About 10 days ago, Sarkar, the CPM’s politburo member, visited the house of a CPM nominee for the urban local body elections, which was ransacked by alleged BJP cadres, who fled after the Left activists resisted.
Over the last few months the attention, however, has been on the "will-it-won’t-it" meetings of Trinamul’s all-India general secretary Abhishek Banerjee. The arrest of the party’s Bengal youth wing chief, Sayani Ghosh, has added fuel to the fire. Short of local talent, the Trinamul has flown in several MPs, MLAs and other functionaries from Bengal to micro-manage the civic polls, where it could field candidates in less than 50 per cent of the seats.
“They vandalised the police station and attacked us twice yesterday. The DGP and IGP are not available on phone. Apparently, the DGP is in some conference with the PM, whereas his state is in chaos. Clearly, law and order situation is not a priority for the government,” said Trinamul MP Sushmita Dev.
Former CPM MP Sujan Chakraborty said, “In the 2018 panchayat polls in Bengal, Trinamul won 34 per cent seats uncontested. The BJP has won uncontested in 34 per cent of seats in Tripura’s urban local body elections. BJP in Tripura is following the footsteps of the Trinamul in Bengal.”
The CPM's rant notwithstanding, Mamata is likely to make the most noise about Tripura during her stay in Delhi. A meeting with the party MPs, some of whom held a protest rally at the North Bloc on Monday morning, is scheduled later tonight.
