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ASSEMBLY POLLS 2001: WEST BENGAL

In The Nick Of Time

State Congressmen may be sore but the Central leadership is more than happy with the humbling Trinamool alliance.

By Labonita Ghosh with Lakshmi Iyer

UNEASY UNION: While Kamal Nath ties up with Mamata (left), a pre-alliance Trinamool election graffiti mocks the cosiness between the Congress and the Left parties

Anil Mudi wears his seniority on his sleeve. The 80-year-old claims to be the only living freedom fighter in the Indian National Congress. In West Bengal, Mudi has seen three Congress regimes through. The party veteran is a well-entrenched legislator (elected twice on the trot) from his native Midnapore district. But Mudi's qualifications won't allow for a hattrick. This week, when the West Bengal Pradesh Congress brings out its final list of candidates for the May 10 polls, Mudi, along with 17 other sitting MLAs, is likely to get the axe. "I've been asking our state leaders 'Is this the reward I get for not defecting to the Trinamool Congress?' " he says. "But they don't have an answer."

How can they? In the hair-splitting "alliance" between the Congress and the Trinamool that came through last week, the state Congress leaders, it appears, had little say in the matter. Spurred by All India Congress Committee President Sonia Gandhi, it was party general secretary and Bengal in-charge Kamal Nath who clinched the pact with Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee after three flights to Kolkata. When Nath, after a token consultation with PCC leaders, first made his "reasonable" request of 72 seats for the Congress-55 for sitting MLAs and likely winners and "friendly contests" in the rest-Mamata shot it down. Last week, after a considerable climbdown, the two parties declared they had reached a consensus on 276 of the 294 assembly seats. This week, they will thrash out their differences on the remaining 18. A final tally should read something like this: 239 seats for the Trinamool and its minor partners, and 55 for the Congress. This involves the disputed 18 being split down the middle.

"It's a natural alliance but constructed under unnatural circumstances," Nath proclaimed, basking in the glow of a job well done. But is it really? State Congress leaders are sore at the way the deal was made. At the joint press meet where Nath and Mamata announced the tie-up, PCC leaders were conspicuously absent. They had been completely sidelined from the final negotiations. They are also peeved about having to agree to fewer seats and being dictated to by a "regional party". When PCC President Pranab Mukherjee was asked about the alliance, he said, "I have no idea what the seat adjustment will be like." He claims he opted out of the negotiations as a matter of strategy.

PCC leaders may be smarting under Sonia's "arm-twisting" but as far as the central leadership is concerned, the move was politically imperative. At the organisational level, the party had to be strengthened and bringing back the extended family into its fold helped. Mamata quitting the NDA made the effort that much easier. For quite sometime now, the Congress had been asking the Trinamool to sever ties with the BJP. Now that she had, the Congress really had no reason to stay away from the prodigal.

What the Congress feared was that if the Trinamool defeated the Left Front, the party would be completely marginalised in the state. It was equally anxious to shake off the tag of being the CPI(M)'s B-team-a catchphrase coined by Mamata to describe the party's lukewarm resistance to the Left in the last two parliamentary elections. "In West Bengal," explains Nath, "you have to be either Left or anti-Left. There is no third space." Mamata, without doubt, symbolised the anti-Left movement.

A more compelling reason for the Trinamool-Congress tie-up was the fact that the Congress would have lost its deposit in 214 of the 294 assembly segments in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. Its victory was limited to three districts-Malda, Murshidabad and Dinajpur. Which was why the AICC was not keen on the number of seats it contested but the number of seats it could win. Nath now says the party has at least 40 winning seats in its kitty.

On its part, the Trinamool too is upbeat. "Mamata will become chief minister," says party MP Sudip Bandopadhyay. "Can there be a better job than that in the state?" But Mamata's route to Writer's Building seems strewn with more ego battles with her new ally. Despite the Congress coopting Trinamool workers at will (mahajot champion A.B.A Ghani Khan Choudhary called them his "brothers and sisters"), watchers don't give the coalition more than a few months either way. "If the Trinamool-Congress team comes to power, it will be bickering over ministries the way it is about assembly seats," says an analyst. "The alliance is starting out with chinks."

Despite bad blood, there are undeniable gains on both sides. Both parties, piggybacking on each other by turns, get a shot at expanding their base. The Trinamool gets to make valuable inroads into such districts as Malda, Murshidabad and Dinajpur while the Congress sees a chance to strike root in south Bengal, Mamata country. On the Trinamool side, there is another important notch-up. Having dumped the BJP, the party can look forward to a considerable swing in minority votes. "There will be a 70 per cent increase in the Muslim pockets," says a confident Bandopadhyay.

When Mamata quit the Congress, the BJP was the only option as an ally. But after a series of elections-two parliamentary, one municipal and one gram panchayat-there is much at stake. Apart from an 11-MP pool, the Trinamool-BJP combine has a majority in at least 14 civic bodies throughout the state. This includes a slim lead over the Left in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. The fate of these administrative bodies now hangs in balance. There are also at least 8,000-odd gram panchayat members left rudderless by the split.

"These elected bodies will not be disturbed by our changed political equations," says BJP leader and Union Minister of State for Communications Tapan Sikdar. The party has now decided to go it alone, with minor partners like the Samata Party and the Jana Lokshakti.

Despite the hoopla, the Trinamool-Congress coalition still doesn't make the numbers. In the 1996 assembly polls, an undivided Congress clinched 82 seats, against the Left Front's 203. In the 1999 parliamentary elections, the two Congresses got 26.04 and 13.29 per cent of the total votes, way short of the Left's 46.74 per cent. In its first-ever assembly elections, the Trinamool is trying to cobble together a Bangla Bachao Front against the Left and, numerically speaking, needs both the Congress and the BJP on its rag-tag team. A third option could have been the Saifuddin Chowdhury-led CPI(M) breakaway Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS). The PDS was all set for an alliance with the Congress before Sonia moved closer to the Trinamool. Now PDS leader Samir Putatunda says his party will not touch "an opportunistic coalition". But as the Congress central leadership realises, only a coalition could defeat the Left. Question is, will Mamata's uneasy union do it?

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Looking Glass

Delhi Exhibition:
Ghislaine Aarsse Prins

Delhi Restaurant:
Art Diva Cafe

Mumbai Bar:
Starboard Bar