Dump & gain: Didi drops Cong, eyes Delhi glory

From April this year, when Mamata Banerjee announced that the Trinamool Congress would spearhead the fight against Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party to restore constitutional democracy, secular values to re-establish a unified but diverse polity within the federal structure, she has not made a secret of where she sees herself and where she wants to get. The timing of her first declaration of intention is significant; the elections for the West Bengal state assembly were in progress and the outcome was unknown.

Installing an alternative in power in New Delhi is Mamata Banerjee’s goal. She is in a hurry because she obviously thinks that allowing the BJP another term in power at the Centre would make it far more difficult to withstand its hegemonic plans of converting India into a Hindutva rashtra, that would dismantle the Constitution and its founding values of secularism, federalism and multiparty democracy.

She has called out the Congress by underscoring that it is not the party it was in 2014. In doing so she has focused on the fact that the Congress is not a party that can lead a coalition that poses a real challenge to Modi and the BJP. Her low expectations from the Congress are a pointer to why the Trinamool Congress has worked to woo discontented members from the party, reflecting the simple truth that one person’s gain is another person’s loss and may the best person win.

Dramatic as Mamata Banerjee’s verdict that the United Progress Alliance no longer exists, it was stating the truth about a defunct alliance. She was not coy about her plans for leading the fight against Modi and ousting the BJP from power in 2024. She was equally candid that the Congress was a leaderless organisation because the scion, Rahul Gandhi was an intermittent performer.

Mamata Banerjee is probably afraid that if the Congress is allowed to continue as the anchor of the anti-BJP opposition alliance, would it make it significantly easier for the BJP to retain power by turning it into a contest between Modi the dynasty, read Rahul Gandhi-Priyanka Gandhi, as well as the legacy of governance that the Congress carries with its accumulated failures and successes. The decline of the party has been dramatic; from winning 206 seats out of the total 543 seats in the Lok Sabha in 2009, the Congress won only 52 seats in 2019.

The Congress post 2019 has become weaker. It could well be that she is apprehensive that the Congress given its current state paralysis would bleed the regional parties and weaken them to the point that the BJP would find it easy to gobble up substantial bits and reduce the original parties into shells.

As soon as the West Bengal elections ended, Mamata Banerjee has been in dynamic mode, visiting New Delhi twice, campaigning in Goa and the most recent and probably politically important visit to Mumbai where she met Nationalist Congress Party leader, Sharad Pawar. There can be no doubt that the meeting between these two ex-Congress veterans was a strategy session on what would transpire over the next few months.

These forays outside Kolkata and the acquisitions that the Trinamool Congress has made since May are indications that Mamata Banerjee believes the crisis of the Congress is an opportunity that should not be wasted. The key to unravelling the puzzle of where the Trinamool Congress is headed and how the “platform” of “collective leadership” will proceed is time and opportunity. She and Pawar made it clear that to engage in the bigger and somewhat distant battle of wresting power from the BJP and ousting Modi, the regional, smaller parties would have to do the heavy lifting.

Mamata Banerjee is bold; some would say she is brash. She is also a risk taker and can take setbacks and defeats in her stride, as is evident from her stumbling progress on her journey to the top in West Bengal.

By recommending that regional parties should sort out on their own the strategy to confront and contain the BJP, Mamata Banerjee is telling them not to let the Congress ride piggyback and assist Modi in converting the series of election fights between 2022 and 2024 into a Congress versus BJP contest, that it would inevitably become as soon as Rahul Gandhi or even Priyanka Gandhi begin campaigning.

Her strategy up to 2024 seems straightforward; curb the Congress so that it cannot become a spoiler in the fight by regional parties against the BJP; work to diminish the BJP and its reputation as a winner and the only alternative.

The Mumbai meeting effectively established the ground rules and the route map. The league of anti-BJP political parties, almost all of them regional parties and mostly led by second generation leaders from the founding families would have to work out how best to cut the ground from under the BJP at a time when the party is certainly vulnerable a