STATES: ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS 2001

New Friends For Old

Dumping the BJP for the Congress has only created a fresh set of problems for Mamata in her battle to snuff out the Left.

By Sumit Mitra

If the CPI(M)-led Left Front in West Bengal were to be compared to Moby Dick, then Mamata Banerjee is admittedly Captain Ahab. True, the good captain in the Herman Melville classic never changed his ship. But the Trinamool Congress supremo is a political harpooner who does not care much for the boat-in her case, the BJP.

As she began her campaign last week to oust CPI(M) from Writers' Buildings in the May 10 assembly election, she was in a new boat-the Congress-that she had discarded four years ago. She seemed to enjoy the new communion with her old Congress buddies. When a thunderstorm lashed the first Trinamool-Congress rally in Kolkata, she called it the "harbinger of change". The assorted Congress bigwigs at the rally, including Congress Working Committee member and state party President Pranab Mukherjee and Congress chief whip in the Lok Sabha P.R. Das Munshi, hailed her as the "next chief minister". A couple of days later, when she began her barnstorming in rural Bengal, the choice of the first venue was Kirnahar, some 250 km from the capital, as "it is Pranabda's place of birth".

TENUOUS TIES: Mamata's (left) alliance with the Congress has outraged Panja (right)

Some Congressmen were sullen at the new alliance, as the 57 seats allotted to the party by Mamata could not please all. The grumpiest were locally powerful Congress MPs A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury and Adhir Chowdhury. Equally unnerved were most of the nine Trinamool MPs. Ajit Kumar Panja, who had to relinquish his post as minister of state for external affairs, even wept before television cameras at this "sellout" to the Congress.

Has Mamata made the right move? In other words, would the Trinamool-BJP alliance have failed to live up to her promise of dethroning the leftists "now or never" ("hoy ebar noy never")? Going by the electoral aggregates, the answer is a cautious yes; politically, however, it is a big no.

In the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress and its minor allies got 16.45 per cent of the valid votes whereas the Trinamool-BJP combination obtained 34.62 per cent. In the 1999 general election, the Congress vote-share in the state slid to 13.53 per cent while the Trinamool-BJP share rose to 37.95 per cent. The Left Front's vote-share remained almost static, at 46.83 per cent and 46.74 per cent in the two years.

Though the Trinamool leaders are wary of offending the BJP-Mamata has carefully avoided criticising the BJP in public, with no mention in the Trinamool poll manifesto of the reason for quitting the NDA-in private discussions they claim that the growth of vote-share with the BJP was not only "painfully slow" but incapable of making a dent in the Left's vote bank. So, if the task of storming the red citadel were to be accomplished "now or never", the BJP was not quite the choice for partner.

Besides, the Trinamool leadership felt that its saffron association was alienating it from a large chunk of the state's 22 per cent Muslim voters, who were voting for the Congress in north Bengal and in parts of Kolkata, and for the CPI(M) in most other areas of the state. "We are a secular party," says Trinamool Policy Making Committee chief Pankaj Banerjee, "yet we were carrying the communal stigma."

So, Mamata has started her campaign on a secular note. In the Muslim-majority district of Murshidabad, she held aloft her twin-flower symbol while alternating the Hindu prayers with the chant of "il Allah, il Allah ..."

She even tried her hand at "Buddham, Sharanam, Gacchami", only to add after a measured pause that by Buddha she meant the lord who had preached the theory of "karma" and not Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the Marxist chief minister. The applause was faint, even in the rural areas not famed for any refined sense of humour.

The broad calculation in the Trinamool camp is that with some erosion of the Left Front's Muslim votes and with unity of the two largest opposition parties, the Left seats will fall far below the 1999 tally of its lead in 189 assembly segments. The party's young enthusiasts gamble on a figure of 130-135 for the Left in the 292-member Assembly.

The epidemic of optimism has spread to the Congress. Former PCC chief Somen Mitra forecasts a "revolutionary change" in the state, "ending 24 years of the Marxist misgovernance". The well of hope springs from none other than Mamata. When confronted recently by some Congressmen whose winnable candidates had to be sacrificed because of the Trinamool-Congress entente, she said, "No problem. After forming the government, I shall accommodate some of them as heads of public undertakings with minister-of-state rank."

However, Mamata has overlooked the BJP factor. In the 1996 assembly elections, the party secured 6.45 per cent of the polled and valid votes without any alliance. Though the party did not win a single seat-it came second in three of the 292 seats contested-its ability as a party-pooper was established beyond doubt. The Congress secured 83 seats. BJP's absence would have increased its tally by 38.