Anil Anand
a.anil.anand@gmail.com
The stormy petrel of Indian politics! She truly fits into the bill of this adage. A fighter to the core who refused to accept “injustice” done to her by her parent party, the Congress. She walked-out to set up a political party of her own, squarely based on her street-fighting skills and enormous capacity to lead from the front.
Rising from the scratch after remaining a Union Minister and president of the West Bengal Youth Congress, Mamta Banerjee, a maverick to the core, was and is a rule onto herself who never accepts any hegemony but has strong tendency to dominate. The white cotton-saree clad simpleton looking diminutive woman briskly walking in her trademark white hawai-chappals led the newly found Trinamool Congress to new heights before the fall with a thud.
Who could have even dreamt of plotting the downfall of the Left-citadel anchored by the indomitable comrade Jyoti Basu who remained chief minister of West Bengal for a record period? There was none to challenge with Congress having fallen on the wayside after further weakened with the quitting of Ms Banerjee and her supporters.
She did literally achieve what was perceived to be an impossible task. The Left’s fortress had fallen and Ms Banerjee rose like a colossal. And dominated West Bengal politics for over a decade till the debacle of 2026 assembly election came.
Keeping aside the controversies surrounding the poll-process for the time being, she was beaten at her own game- defeating the Left- by the new emerging power in state, the Bharatiya Janata Party. The latter fully trudged on the communal contours rising on the controversial bogey of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists by the Election Commission of India. Ordered in a huff which resulted in deletion of lakhs of voters within no time, put a question mark on the entire process.
The once a stormy petrel of the yore was defanged by none other than a political party, BJP, with which she had once been in alliance and became the railway minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee dispensation. There is no doubt that her aligning with the saffron party at that juncture opened a window for the BJP in West Bengal for the first time, despite the founder of the party’s former formation Bharatiya Jan Sangh, Dr Shayma Prasad Mukherjee, being a native of the state.
Was it Ms Banerjee’s miscalculation to have sided with the BJP squarely out of her hatred for the Congress on the lines of the socialist brigade led by former Defence Minister, George Fernandes?
The cases, though, are not comparable, strong dislike for Congress was a common thread. After all both of them, born mavericks, were cabinet colleagues in the Vajpayee government. Both of them overshot their respective ideologies based on secularism to make a common cause with the “Hindutva agenda” to checkmate the Congress and at the same time keep politically afloat.
While Mr Fernandes had somewhere meekly surrendered as during the twilight of his political career the once firebrand leader had lost his sting before the towering Vajpayee-Advani duo. Ms Banerjee stood her ground and refused to budge before the same BJP now hemmed by yet another duo from the same formation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
So far so good. All this while till she lost election and the chief minister’s chair, Ms Banerjee abhorred the rickety I.N.D.I.A bloc of the opposition parties, at times ridiculing it particularly Rahul Gandhi. Not only did she play hide and seek at crucial junctures but at times her tantrums weakened the opposition unity even before it could take a shape.
Was it to still indirectly help her erstwhile ally turned enemy who has ultimately consumed her? Or was it to force her fellow opposition party leaders to accept her supremacy and leadership unconditional?
She might not have liked to help BJP (read Modi-Shah) but her unpredictability and her mercurial ways of functioning did aid the saffron party by jeopardizing, knowingly or unknowingly, the cause of opposition unity. At the end it added to Mr Modi’s strength.
Well, true to her nature she suddenly discovered her long lost love for the I.N.D.I.A bloc minutes after her defeat. A sullen and crestfallen Ms Banerjee in her first press conference after a massive BJP “wave” talked of her next goal to strengthen the alliance. “Not as a leader but as a commoner (read worker)”, was the catch phrase of her presentation.
Except for Mr Gandhi (read Congress) most of the opposition leaders and their outfits seem to have ignored the “might” of Mr Modi despite the BJP failing to muster a simple majority on its own in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The three glaring examples are those of Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray, Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar, both the parties are now split and the leaders nursing their wounds, and now Mamta Banerjee lording over the defeat of Trinamool Congress. But for marginal splits in her ranks, here and there, she withstood the Modi-Shah combine’s onslaught at engineering a major split as has happened in the other two parties.
Who can forget the unceremonious transition of Nitish Kumar from Bihar’s chief minister, vacating the chair for BJP, to Rajya Sabha MP. And Biju Janata Dal chief Naveen Patnaik is licking his wounds after being waylaid by an “old and trusted ally” the BJP.
However, the duo seemed to have other plans down their sleeves which an overconfident and arrogant, Ms Banerjee either ignored to see through or inimitably decided to take the things head-on. Was she ignorant about the ground realities and changing electoral map and people’s mind? Did she fail to counter the polarizing agenda of the BJP and fell in their trap to match it with a similar counter though of a different shade?
These and many more questions will haunt her in the time to come. What baffles one the most is that why did not she plan to unitedly enter the poll arena to face BJP’s growing influence, armed with the statecraft.
It is ironic for the opposition unity that most of its leaders remember I.N.D.I.A only either after the electoral defeat or during the time of crisis. A sturdy framework for opposition unity has to be cemented during normal times with the leaders keeping their egos and hypothetical ambitions aside.
No one is sure as to how Ms Banerjee’s defeat in her native state will strengthen the I.N.D.I.A bloc. She has weakened her case to spearhead the combine enroute to becoming Prime Ministerial candidate. Instead, leaders such as her and DMK chief M K Stalin, both lost their assembly seats, should restart the effort at opposition unity on a very humble note.
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