By Anjan Roy
West Bengal is witnessing hectic political manoeuvring by leading political figures, even though the assembly elections are a clear six months away at least.
One of these, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who was once a stalwart of the Congress, not only in the state but nationally, is being seen on his home turf, Murshidabad and nearby areas, seeking to regain his lost ground. Chowdhury had been Congress state president and later, leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha.
Mamata Banerjee had made it her singular point to defeat Adhir Chowdhury in his constituency and she made various alliances with rivals to defeat Adhir. As a result Adhir Chowdhury had lost his seat at the same time he lost favour of the Congress central leaders.
Chowdhury was replaced as a state Congress president. But his replacement in the hot seat proved to be quite inadequate to the job and Congress has gone almost extinct in Bengal. Of course, with the polarisation that happened in the wake of Mamata’s rise to power, Congress has lost all relevance and their vote bank has severely eroded.
In fact, Mamata’s one plank idea was to poach on Congress to build her party, just as she herself was in the Congress and was primarily backed by Rajiv Gandhi as a youth leader. It was Rajiv who had sent her on her maiden overseas trip, which she had recalled subsequently.
But as she built her new party, the All India Trinamool Congress, defecting from the mother organisation, she broke Congress to build her own outfit. Now that Congress is wiped out, Mamata has made every effort to retain the Congress vote base, particularly among the Muslims.
In pursuit of that strategy, Mamata has gone to extremes. It was her challenge, after defeating and wrecking the Congress, to wean away the Muslim backers of the Left parties, particularly the CPI(M), in which she has been quite successful.
Many of her frontline fighters turned out to be the deserters from the CPI(M). However, subsequently, they turned out to be burdensome/carrying ideological baggage of the past and she promptly had to move away from these elements. After being hugely successful in attracting Muslims into her party, she has now reached the point of diminishing returns.
Many of the Muslim leaders working under her have turned more ambitious than Mamata can comfortably accommodate within the ambit of her party, while some are in definite rebellious mood. It is not clear whether these are, as yet, real revolts against her for greater profile and power, or mere posturing. Muslims are also asserting for their own political dividends than simply being satisfied with the morsels that Mamata is throwing at them.
One of her stalwart leaders, Humayun Kabir, has become too big for his shoes and has effectively thrown a challenge at Mamata herself. He has now floated his own party and claims to have the allegiance of the Muslims. He is calculating that once his party pulls in Muslim votes, he would play the role of a kingmaker in the state as none of the other leading parties would be in a position to form the government.
While these are early days, it is not clear how the Muslim votes are drifting among the different players. Some are claiming a part of Muslim votes should go back to their old destinations, like the Congress and the CPI(M), while others are suggesting that many of the Muslim fringe parties would draw in these votes.
Facing these fluid scenarios, Mamata Banerjee is now seeking to widen her appeal and going back to the mainstream of West Bengal vote bank — the Bengali Hindus. Mamata is seeking to curry favours with some very open actions seeking support from the Hindu voters.
Mamata has already built a massive Jagannath Temple in Digha which is Bengal’s well-known sea beach, not far from Odisha border. Her temple structure closely follows the much more famous, deemed holiest of holy Hindu pilgrimage town, the Jagannath Temple of Puri.
However, nobody really believes this is even remotely comparable to the original temple in Puri. Mamata has handed over the management of her Digha temple to ISKON. She is not stopping with that.
Now she has inaugurated the construction of “Durgangan” in the state’s elite New Town area. Anything to do with Durga has strong emotional appeal among the Bengali Hindus and Banerjee has now launched this new project for an ambitious Durga temple and adjoining complex, to woo back the state’s non-TMC supporting Hindus.
Nonetheless, the programme has already been caught up in controversy of a kind. The original earlier plot selected for the Durga temple was claimed to have belonged to Muslims and they had objected to its construction in a petition to the High Court. The court later stayed construction and the site had to be hurriedly shifted.
Surely, that could not be the end of her election strategy. She is now riding on two horses — an irreconcilable feat, to say the least. But it must be said that her political skills are more than the combined skills of all other players in the West Bengal fray. (IPA )
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