By Ashis Biswas
For Bengal chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC) party — the names are interchangeable — these are hard times. During the past few days, which no doubt the volatile iron lady of Bengal politics would do her best to forget, a series of major and minor setbacks have buffeted both leader and party, as never before.
First, Ms Banerjee’s ill-advised venture into the lofty levels of highly visible Delhi-based deal-making, backstabbing politics, ended in a disaster. The wily Samajwadi party (SP) leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, who has at different times reduced the powerful CPI(M) party and even Mrs Sonia Gandhi to political apprenticeship, took exactly six hours to cut Ms Banerjee down to size over Presidential elections. Only six hours separated his press conference with Ms Banerjee, where he publicly pledged to support her, from his secret rendezvous with Mrs Gandhi, when he privately shifted his preference to the UPA Presidential candidate — and to hell with TMC!
Even her worst critics felt her exertions to make political common cause with Mr, Yadav, courtesy SP lightweight Kiranmay Nanda, was akin to embracing a buzz-saw.
What seems amazing in retrospect is Ms Banerjee’s refusal to learn from history, even recent history. Was she not aware of Mr, Singh’s reputation of unreliability?
Only Ms Banerjee could answer that one. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that in her new found ambition to play the undisputed heroine at national centre-stage, she was in a desperate hurry to drum up political support from anyone and everyone. This, despite the fact that her present undertaking is pre- destined to failure, by common consent among most observers. Is it very realistic to talk about a Fourth Front possibility in Indian politics at the moment? Call it the Federal Front or the Future Front, will the electorate be convinced by a new disparate (desperate?) coalition of parties and groups, independent of and opposing, the UPA, the NDA and the Left? With the added proviso that it would be led by someone like Ms Banerjee?
By now, Ms Banerjee can be assumed to have learnt the answer, at the expense of an avoidable public faux pas that forced her to retreat from New Delhi, her dignity dented, and to head for Kolkata. Here too, she avoided the press and instead took recourse to using the facebook to get her message across. It is learnt that a Rajya Sabha MP, the most articulate in English among the TMC .lot, helps Ms Banerjee develop her blogging skills, not to be confused with the apparently incoherent but otherwise faithful, newly elected MP who accompanied her during her tryst with disaster in Delhi.
The episode put a temporary end to Ms Banerjee’s ambitions to dominate the centre-stage of Indian politics.Unfortunately, bad luck continued to plague the TMC on its homestretch too. Minister for Sports Mr Madan Mitra, like his more famous leader, is not one for letting the grass grow under his feet. While his leader was busy in Delhi, he had by government order dismissed district Sports bodies, which were set up under the Left Front Government. What officials overlooked was that these bodies mostly functioned under local trusts which however held regular elections and maintained their accounts.
As these bodies sought legal relief, the Kolkata High Court ordered a stay on the government order, instructed authorities to reopen closed offices and to unfreeze old bank accounts. Asked why the government had ignored the autonomy of these organisations, Mitra replied that some of them were functioning on space provided by the government, as though this automatically rendered them liable to official punishment!(IPA Service)