A match to boost Trinamool’s national aspirations

The political class in India is no stickler for manners. Yet, it follows an unspoken rule of etiquette that would not permit the leader of a local party to claim the prime ministerial office as his or her right. At least not unless there is a constitutional crisis, as it happened in 1996, when HD Deve Gowda, the humble farmer, made his way to South Block, and generally snoozed through his seven months there.  

The times have changed. The belief that Congress and BJP, between themselves, are born to rule is increasingly questioned. The leaders of local parties have begun to think nationally. Nor are most them much impressed by the general hype about Gujarat Chief Minister and BJP’s choice as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bandwagon picking up over 200 (out of 543) seats in the coming general election. In the telling words of Mamata Banerjee, perhaps the craftiest of India’s new generation of regional leaders, “neither is BJP the alternative to Congress nor is Congress the alternative to BJP”.

Mamata, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, even the “fodder scam”tainted Lalu Yadav — all of them are now South Block aspirants. But Mamata is inching ahead of them in the race. Though she treads lightly about Narendra Modi, the favourite of the 2014 electoral Derby, she was the first state leader to stake her claim as a “federalist” option to the big-party domination. She was spurned by others but didn’t give up.

In Bengal, her home state, she is not as popular as she was in 2011, when she ended the 34-year-long near-sinecure of CPI(M). The Left’s musclemen have switched uniform and have flooded “didi’s” party, Trinamool Congress. Free from CPI(M)’s Stalinist bureaucratic control, they have unleashed a wave of murder, rape and arson which Mamata can hardly control because she may need their assistance in the Lok Sabha polls and beyond. And, following the Saradha chit fund scam, in which ordinary people’s unsecured savings were swindled away, her government has betrayed a suspiciously stubborn determination to keep CBI out of the investigation. In her two-and-a-half years in power in Kolkata, she has understood the limitations of a state government’s power to meet people’s expectations — be it for employment, housing or health care — and yet maintain a clean and transparent image.  

She’s thinking of a way out. And she thinks on a grand scale, much like her paintings — they may be lacking in tutoring but the canvas is always large. Under her orders, TMC is contesting over a 100 seats, including all the seven in Delhi and many in the neighbouring states. In yet another smart move, she has teamed up with activist Anna Hazare, hoping his campaigning for her will whitewash the stains that the Saradha affair splashed on her squeaky clean image.

It may be a match made in heaven. With Arvind Kejriwal, Anna’s top acolyte, having broken off and proved to his mentor that street protest hasn’t much future if it can’t find the way to Parliament, the ‘saint’ of Ralegan Siddhi was desperately trying to prove his usefulness when an envoy of Mamata came to meet him. KD Singh, Trinamool Rajya Sabha member, and himself a big-time player in the business of unregulated public collection, was the envoy.

It is said that post-2011 Trinamool could grab most of the local body seats because these polls are conducted without Central supervision. In case Mamata’s hold in Bengal gets dented in May, she’s readying up to compensate for it with gains from other states, and to join the big race if Modi is stalled at around 160. But it is a very big ‘if’.

The author is a current affairs analyst