Dinesh Trivedi lands in TMC’s ICU by the evening

It was a classic case of the Union government being run from Kolkata. On a day when a brave Dinesh Trivedi became the first railway minister to hike passenger fares after nine years, he lost his job because Bengal chief minister, the mercurial Mamata Banerjee was extremely upset with his bold economic move.

In a late night decision, Banerjee sent a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office urging the PM to remove Trivedi from his present position and let Mukul Roy, her trusted lieutenant, take charge of the railways. Roy is considered extremely loyal to the Bengal CM and would be expected to toe Mamata’s line.

By afternoon, it was clear that Trivedi wouldn’t survive in the Manmohan Singh government. As soon as he finished reading the budget speech, his own party MPs launched a scathing attack on him for increasing fares across the board. Trivedi is expected to put in his papers anytime today morning.

Late at night, the Congress core group met at 7 Race Course Road to discuss the fall-out of an impatient Mamata Banerjee trying to have her way and dictating terms unreasonably over the past couple of weeks. Though the senior leaders discussed the issue of rollback of the rise in railway fares as demanded by Banerjee, the prime minister was apparently reluctant to give in to her “unfair” demands. A few senior leaders were averse to a “complete” rollback.

The Congress leaders discussed the all-important issue of numbers and took a firm decision to reach out to the SP and the BSP, now that it was becoming near-impossible to continue in any form of alliance with Mamata. At the meeting, no decision was taken on accepting the resignation of Trivedi.

Banerjee, who was in Nandigram earlier during the day, had been insisting that she had “not been consulted” and that the only way out of the situation was a “complete rollback”. The same views were echoed by leader of the TMC in Lok Sabha, Sudip Bandopadhyay and Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’ Brien, who had earlier tweeted about his disagreement with Trivedi’s proposal.
It is generally assumed that even if Trivedi functions with a degree of independence, he consults his leader Mamata Banerjee at every crucial step. But on this occasion, Trivedi insisted that he had not got the budget approved by Mamata. It was difficult not to agree with him because reports from Kolkata suggested that the chief minister was furious after she came to know of a rise in fares.

Trivedi did not take all the criticism lying down. He, too, lashed out at his party saying that the “railway ministry doesn’t take orders from Writers’ Buildings” and “to me country comes first, followed by family and then party”. He also said: “Bhagat Singh sacrificed his life for the country and losing a chair is nothing in comparison”. In the evening, after he had given several television interviews, he looked every bit a martyr and was waiting for the signal from Kolkata to quit his job.

Given all that he had uttered against the party leadership in his anger, he had taken the risk of being thrown out. No doubt, Mamata didn’t wait long to act against him. She consulted her party MPs in Delhi and decided there was no way of saving Trivedi. After all, he had gone against the party’s fundamental principle of “standing by the poor, come what may”. To the TMC leaders, he had toed the line laid down by the Congress.

Trivedi has been riding his luck for quite some time. Having emerged victorious in a difficult red bastion, Barrackpore in 2009, he had been chosen to be a minister of state for health in the Union government. Subsequently, when Mamata vacated the railways portfolio after becoming chief minister in 2011, he was asked to take over the ministry after careful consideration. There are reasons to believe that Trivedi had been feeling suffocated with so much pressure exerted from Kolkata. For the past few months, he had been trying to carve out his own path.

He did remember to pronounce Mamata Banerjee’s name a dozen times in the course of his long budget speech this afternoon but his elevation as the railway minister had earned him quite a few enemies within the party. There were seniors within the party who hadn’t taken kindly to his promotion and was envious of his good fortune.

A senior Congress leader said in the evening that this “was sheer madness” and it was “best not to walk with such a volatile ally”. No wonder then that the Congress was preparing to part ways with Mamata Banerjee. After all, given her opposition to the fare hike, she might be extremely upset with any of the people-unfriendly proposals that finance minister Pranab Mukherjee might come up with in his general budget.