TMC foundation built on sand

What Mamata Banerjee’s TMC is facing is the new trend emerging among some smaller political parties pan India. The credit goes to the BJP, which has built a successful model integrating money power, use of central law enforcement agencies, the ECI and more often capitalising on the disgruntled politicians for whom ethics, morality, loyalty take a back seat to their ambitions and politics of convenience. BJP apart from mastering the art of social engineering, has been able to see through the vulnerabilities of their smaller political opponents to perfection.

The BJP has been successful in beating seasoned veteran politicians like Sharad Pawar by decimating his NCP and splitting it into two. The legendary Shiv Sena also collapsed the same way. Nitish Kumar and his JD (U) have been cut to size in Bihar, and the Kejriwal- led AAP lost a chunk of its MPs in BJP engineered manoeuvres.

However, for BJP, the greatest success was West Bengal where not only did it win a landslide majority, thanks to the unwavering support of ECI, paramilitary and the central probe agencies, but is now executing the second part of its agenda, decimating the TMC. It must be added here that Mamata is to be equally blamed for her present imbroglio and her virtual battle to stay politically relevant. Her arrogance, losing touch with her grassroot cadre, disregard for anti incumbency and massive corruption in the rank and file of her party, combined together leading to her downfall.

Added to this, was the changed political equation drawn by the BJP- RSS combination, wherein, for the first time in Bengal’s political history, a Hindu vote consolidation and fragmentation of the minority votes was successfully launched by the BJP, coupled with SIR deletions. In a way, she offered the political battle field on a platter to the saffron party.

She trusted the wrong people, opportunists who scored gains at her expense. Those who have now abandoned and rebelled against her, were all mentored and picked up by her, groomed and unfortunately, trusted. A veteran street fighter like Mamata should have done better to judge and be prepared for the debacle.

Time demands stricter self-introspection for Mamata and her TMC, if she wants to stay relevant at all in politics. At 71, things are extremely difficult for her and a party born out of a movement solely aimed at dislodging the left front regime from Bengal, but primarily devoid of any ideology. However, a more disturbing fact is that once again Bengal has been plunged into a situation where there is no democratic political opposition to the ruling saffron dispensation, and a vacuum has been created, much on the same lines during the TMC reign.