Didi’s gambit: Race Course Road in sights?

By Venkatesh Kesari

She might not have projected herself as a prime ministerial candidate yet but there is no doubt that West Bengal Chief Minister and the Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee is taking the first steps into doing so, as exemplified by the calculated expansion of her party’s base to create a pan-India presence. She is taking the help of those who see her as the only leader who can check the BJP juggernaut and PM Narendra Modi when the 2024 general elections are due.

Mamata is marching ahead at a time when regional parties like the DMK, YSR Congress Party, TRS, Biju Janata Dal and AAP which are in power in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and Delhi, either lack national ambitions or do not want to take on the BJP head-on: barring the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal who has shown an inclination for a national role.

The Trinamool Congress has opened its offices in Haryana and is going to contest the Goa assembly polls. Currently, it is focusing on Tripura, Goa and Haryana to build a national base. Mamata has said that she will address meetings in Uttar Pradesh if Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav wants her to campaign against the BJP. She wants to visit Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and also plans to call on Maharashtra chief minister and Shiv Sena supremo Uddhav Thackeray and NCP chief Sharad Pawar on November 30 in Mumbai. Recently, 12 out of 17 Congress MLAs in Meghalaya quit the Congress party and joined her Trinamool Congress. So what is Didi planning for her national plunge? She would like to be the pivot of the anti-BJP coalition and occupy the prime space which Congress has hitherto been holding on to by attracting leaders, legislators and MPs who are keen on seeing the BJP and Narendra Modi defeated in 2024.

Election strategist and founding member of the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) Prashant Kishor is working with her to make sure dissidents in the Congress, who do not feel comfortable working with Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, move to the TMC at an appropriate time.

There is a discernible change in national politics but what shape it takes and whether Didi can channelise the frustration against the Modi government into a powerful anti-BJP front remains to be seen. The fact that the Congress has been unable to win over regional parties in Andhra, Telangana and other states will work to her advantage, as will the reluctance of the Samajwadi Party and RJD to see the Congress emerge stronger in UP and Bihar.

There is no doubt that Didi and her every action will be avidly watched in the months to come. The opposition space has been waiting for a powerful player for far too long and she, just maybe, could emerge as the messianic force around whom the disparate opposition coalesces, to stop the BJP from winning a third term in office. Modi, meanwhile must rue his speech writer’s inclusion of the provocative taunt ‘Didi O Didi’ that is said to have been the turning point for the transformation of Mamata Banerjee from regional satrap to prime ministerial parvenu.

Local and regional factors usually dominate campaigns in Assembly polls held separately from the Lok Sabha elections, but that may not be the case this time in UP, Punjab or Uttarakhand. The farmers’ stir which farmer leaders have said would be withdrawn only after their other demands including the statutory minimum support price for their crops are conceded, dominates the national discourse. The impact of the year-long agitation continues to reverberate in the corridors of power in Delhi where the ruling BJP is making franttic efforts to make good the loss of face over the withdrawal of the farm laws.

That brings us to the pivotal question - can a handful of leaders with political ambitions that far outweigh their actual clout - Rakesh Tikait, Varun Gandhi and Jayant Chaudhary - make a difference to outcomes in the poll-bound states? All three are ambitious to the core and are daring too at a time when an aggressive BJP and the Narendra Modi dispensation have laid down tough ground rules – ‘If you are not with us, you are against us’. ‘My way or the highway’ is their unwritten motto which has landed the prime minister and his supporters in a political muddle more often than once.

Tikait, Jayant and Varun are not exactly the ‘Three Musketeers’ but they are bound by the common cause of fighting for agitating farmers whom the BJP top brass at the Centre and in UP dubbed as ‘Khalistanis’ and anti-nationals till the other day. The three leaders have no doubt been uttering the plain truth that this is no way to treat the ‘anna data’.

What matters most is that Tikait, Chaudhary and Gandhi have their ears to the ground. And despite the debilitating sting of the ‘dy