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STATES: ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS
2001
New Friends For Old
Dumping the BJP
for the Congress has only created a fresh set of problems for Mamata in
her battle to snuff out the Left.
By Sumit Mitra
If the CPI(M)-led
Left Front in West Bengal were to be compared to Moby Dick, then Mamata
Banerjee is admittedly Captain Ahab. True, the good captain in the Herman
Melville classic never changed his ship. But the Trinamool Congress supremo
is a political harpooner who does not care much for the boat-in her case,
the BJP.
As she began her campaign last week to oust
CPI(M) from Writers' Buildings in the May 10 assembly election, she was
in a new boat-the Congress-that she had discarded four years ago. She
seemed to enjoy the new communion with her old Congress buddies. When
a thunderstorm lashed the first Trinamool-Congress rally in Kolkata, she
called it the "harbinger of change". The assorted Congress bigwigs
at the rally, including Congress Working Committee member and state party
President Pranab Mukherjee and Congress chief whip in the Lok Sabha P.R.
Das Munshi, hailed her as the "next chief minister". A couple
of days later, when she began her barnstorming in rural Bengal, the choice
of the first venue was Kirnahar, some 250 km from the capital, as "it
is Pranabda's place of birth".
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TENUOUS TIES: Mamata's (left) alliance with the Congress has outraged
Panja (right)
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Some Congressmen were sullen at the new alliance,
as the 57 seats allotted to the party by Mamata could not please all.
The grumpiest were locally powerful Congress MPs A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury
and Adhir Chowdhury. Equally unnerved were most of the nine Trinamool
MPs. Ajit Kumar Panja, who had to relinquish his post as minister of state
for external affairs, even wept before television cameras at this "sellout"
to the Congress.
Has Mamata made the right move? In other words,
would the Trinamool-BJP alliance have failed to live up to her promise
of dethroning the leftists "now or never" ("hoy ebar noy
never")? Going by the electoral aggregates, the answer is a cautious
yes; politically, however, it is a big no.
In the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress and
its minor allies got 16.45 per cent of the valid votes whereas the Trinamool-BJP
combination obtained 34.62 per cent. In the 1999 general election, the
Congress vote-share in the state slid to 13.53 per cent while the Trinamool-BJP
share rose to 37.95 per cent. The Left Front's vote-share remained almost
static, at 46.83 per cent and 46.74 per cent in the two years.
Though the Trinamool leaders are wary of offending
the BJP-Mamata has carefully avoided criticising the BJP in public, with
no mention in the Trinamool poll manifesto of the reason for quitting
the NDA-in private discussions they claim that the growth of vote-share
with the BJP was not only "painfully slow" but incapable of
making a dent in the Left's vote bank. So, if the task of storming the
red citadel were to be accomplished "now or never", the BJP
was not quite the choice for partner.
Besides, the Trinamool leadership felt that
its saffron association was alienating it from a large chunk of the state's
22 per cent Muslim voters, who were voting for the Congress in north Bengal
and in parts of Kolkata, and for the CPI(M) in most other areas of the
state. "We are a secular party," says Trinamool Policy Making
Committee chief Pankaj Banerjee, "yet we were carrying the communal
stigma."
So, Mamata has started her campaign on a secular
note. In the Muslim-majority district of Murshidabad, she held aloft her
twin-flower symbol while alternating the Hindu prayers with the chant
of "il Allah, il Allah ..."
She even tried her hand at "Buddham, Sharanam,
Gacchami", only to add after a measured pause that by Buddha she
meant the lord who had preached the theory of "karma" and not
Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the Marxist chief minister. The applause was faint,
even in the rural areas not famed for any refined sense of humour.
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A chunk of Muslim votes
and the unity of the two largest opposition parties, hopes Trinamool,
will severely dent the Left's seat count.
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The broad calculation in the Trinamool camp is
that with some erosion of the Left Front's Muslim votes and with unity
of the two largest opposition parties, the Left seats will fall far below
the 1999 tally of its lead in 189 assembly segments. The party's young
enthusiasts gamble on a figure of 130-135 for the Left in the 292-member
Assembly.
The epidemic of optimism has spread to the Congress.
Former PCC chief Somen Mitra forecasts a "revolutionary change"
in the state, "ending 24 years of the Marxist misgovernance".
The well of hope springs from none other than Mamata. When confronted
recently by some Congressmen whose winnable candidates had to be sacrificed
because of the Trinamool-Congress entente, she said, "No problem.
After forming the government, I shall accommodate some of them as heads
of public undertakings with minister-of-state rank."
However, Mamata has overlooked the BJP factor.
In the 1996 assembly elections, the party secured 6.45 per cent of the
polled and valid votes without any alliance. Though the party did not
win a single seat-it came second in three of the 292 seats contested-its
ability as a party-pooper was established beyond doubt. The Congress secured
83 seats. BJP's absence would have increased its tally by 38.
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