Mamata-Swamy meet sets tongues wagging

By Ajay Jha | NT

New Delhi: Mamata Banerjee has been on a spree to expand her party to give it a pan-India look. She had inducted three ex-MPs Kirti Azad, Pawan K Varma and Ashok Tanwar in the party on Tuesday. This followed the induction of former federal ministers Yashwant Sinha and Babul Supriyo, the then Mahila Congress national chief Sushmita Dev and former Goa chief minister Luizinho Faleiro in the party in the last few months.

Of them, Sushmita Dev and Faleiro have already been sent to the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal, where her party is in a brute majority. Sending Sushmita Dev and Faleiro to the Rajya Sabha is currently working in her favour as she seeks to expand the Trinamool Congress beyond West Bengal.

Her cold shouldering of the Congress was reinforced by her public refusal to meet Congress president Sonia Gandhi, while announcing plans to meet Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar during her visit to Mumbai, both of whom have tapped her electoral adviser Prashant Kishor in the past.

Nevertheless, speculation persists that Banerjee could call on Sonia Gandhi and meet some other opposition leaders in a bid to strengthen her claim as the united opposition’s face for the next general elections before she wraps up her New Delhi visit on Thursday.

However, it was the unexpected visit by the veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Dr Subramanian Swamy that raised even more eyebrows.

Swamy may be back to his old game to arm-twist the BJP to give him another term in the Rajya Sabha which expires on April 24 next year. Swamy has been upset with the BJP leadership for denying him a ministerial berth in the Narendra Modi government and his recent ouster from the BJP national executive.

Swamy is notorious in Delhi’s corridors of power for his nuisance value. He was responsible for organising a meeting between the then Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa and the Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi in 1998, leading to the downfall of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998 by a single vote.

After meeting Banerjee, Swamy said that he was already with her and there is no need for him to join her Trinamool Congress party. Later in a tweet, he took an indirect jibe at the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he compared Banerjee with JP (Jaiprakash Narayan) and four past prime ministers – Morarji Desai, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandrashekhar and PV Narasimha Rao who, he said, meant what they said and said what they meant. “In Indian politics that is a rare quality,” Swamy said.

Banerjee, on her part, said, “he (Swamy) is a senior person, BJP MP You can meet anybody if a person is interested to meet you. There may be political differences but what’s the harm? This is our democracy.” -(PTI)